Peering Into 2008

Jim Kunstler (author of The Long Emergency) has got his 2008 predictions out there, and it's worth a read if only for his hysterically funny descriptions of what is really a very unfunny situation - the state of the world as we know it heading into this coming year.

For those of us who have known this is coming for a very long time, there's no satisfaction in the "I told you so"s that will be ringing out as the oil prices rise and the ice caps melt. For every time I've been told my views are "extremist" or "hysterical environmentalist", I've always known in my heart that what I really was was a realist in a land of dreamers. Yet what can we do, but do the things that we can do to the best of our abilities, and hold onto love and happiness and all of the positive things that we can.

Our family watched a movie last night, an old Disney flick called Miracle of the White Stallions, about the saving of the Lipizzaner horses during the last dark days of WWII. Any time I see or read something about WWII, the parallels always hit me. I wish I was better at remembering movie dialogue, there was one place in the movie where they were discussing the impending fall of the Reich, and how they had gotten to such a place where Hitler was allowed to dictate whether or not they could play music by Mendellsohn. The quote was something like "Don't be too hard on the people. It didn't come all at once. A little at a time, these things were eroded away, and everyone said "that's not so bad".

I'm looking toward the caucuses on our East coast with hopefulness today, but the hope is that we can at least start turning around the eroding of freedoms and the warlike countenance that has pervaded my nation's identity in the last regime. For the rest - the peak oil and the ice caps and the rainforests and all of that, I'll be planting my gardens and crossing those fingers, hoping that the coming crises will bring out the best in people, not just the worst.