General Discussion

Resigned perhaps. Like Locut0s, I'm 31 (As of just a few days ago, in fact) and I look forward with the realization that pretty much everything is a steady downhill drop.

Once you come to understand this, that really, no matter what anyone does right now, we're in for a century of being beaten in the face with axe handles, it stops being a huge worry. Of course still strive for the best you can, just with the knowledge that your best isn't going to get the boulder back up the hill.

- Our political system is fucked. And the problem is, it was designed that way. Whether an unintended consequence (how our election system creates two big parties by default) or fully intentional (the glacial, almost reactionary pace of advancing change through constitutional channels) the whole thing was set up with the inevitibility that it would be what it is today. Which when you consider that it was penned by wealthy white slave-owners who were staging a bloody rebellion with consripts recruited under threat of arms in order to evade their taxes, makes a lot of sense.

- The culture itself is coming unglued. I'm not talking "culture war" bullshit, but the very concept of culture itself. Where everyone is a "self-centered self-made individual," there can be no community. Where 80% of media is consolidated into the hands of fifty people, there can be no free thought. we've had our attention spans whittled down to practically nothing, and our ideas of philosophy, humor, politics, irony, tragedy, are all basically encapsulated in a 22-minute episode of "Family Guy." Education is going down, with basic science and history constantly being beaten to death with hammers because two states full of dumbfucks control the book markets. And the internet, for all its potential and amazing content? For every would-be Carl Sagan posting material online, there's five hundred motherfuckers making deepak Chopra look legitimate. Our culture frowns on thought and dismisses community, we are essentially a tribe of apes united only by sniggering at cartoon dick jokes.

- if politics and culture are arid wastelands, well, maybe I shouldn't talk about the environment. When I was little, I saved a portion of my allowance to donate to the World Wide Fund for Nature. Every year for about five years, I'd pop a money order into the mail, because I thought it would help save tigers or something. And you know, maybe it did help. Do you know why there's not bigger news about the western black rhinoceros going extinct? I mean it really should be a big deal right, a seven-ton mammal just died out because a bunch of ignorant fucks think snorting the fingernail shit its horn is made of will give their peckers a boost. Bu it's not. Why? Because it doesn't fucking matter that this thing went extinct. The rhino is gone, so it certainly doesn't care, but what I mean is... it's just one species in a panoply of others just like it that are going to die out, because of what has been done to the environment. In the 70's and 80's, ecologists were concerned about the barred owl or the snail darter. In the 90's, they were worried about entire ecosystems. By 2005, they were worried about the planet being habitable, and now on the eve of 2014, it looks like they've pretty much just given the fuck up. Game over. I don't try to save tigers anymore because tigers don't fucking float.

This is my world, and I think I always knew this is what it was going to be.

Unlike locut0s, I absolutely blame previous generations. While perhaps some aspects of this shithole were unavoidable and others were just mistaken... Nobody alive today is ignorant. Nobody alive in 1974 was ignorant, it had all been laid out back then. And still the waste continued. Still the pillaging continued. Because, eh, fuck it, our kids will pick up the tab. Had no problem at all gutting everything between the cradle and retirement, but HOLY SHIT don't touch social security!

Okay. Maybe a little helpless. And certainly a little angry. What I'm saying though is that once you understand that you will be inheriting a wasteland, no matter what, even if right now, everyone hit the brakes and started backpedaling as hard as they could... you come to accept it. A realization that hey, you'll figure out a way to make it work. Humanity goes on, even in the coming dark age.