crows

It's been a long time since my last post. Since that time much that has changed in my little view. Winter has been long and my vision for beauty has been undeniably affected. As of November, my paradigm of safety, having grown up in 20th century US, has insulated me deeply from the basic struggles of humanity since its beginning. Food. Shelter. Water. Safety. Those questions we have not had to ask about much here in the US, but very swiftly that seems to be changing.

With the shattering of my sense of invulnerability came a very long struggle to restore the sense of security I had prior to that. It has not come. Instead I have read increasingly worrisome information that gives me not peace but points me to a stronger conclusion that I have been right, that my sense of doom was not out of nowhere but based on a trajectory that began perhaps centuries ago but has escalated to not just a housing bubble bursting but others reaching their maximum as well, including a cultural bubble. In my search for debunking my thoughts, I ended up finding information that instead reinforced them. Each day I see unfolding more and more indicators that we are witnessing the collapse of this society as we have known it. I hope I am wrong, at least in the way that could create an enormous amount of suffering.

One blog I've been reading is by the author, Dmitry Orlov, who has studied the fall of society in Russia in the 1990's. His blog is called ClubOrlov. His conclusions about our current society's fate is based on what he knows about Russia's collapse, and of course we are in many ways quite different than they were then. It may be insufficient to compare us to what happened in Russia and Russia alone, since we have a completely different social system. I look out my window and see homes of neighbors who are quite comfortable keeping a wide berth around themselves, telephones and TVs going, church friends 7 days and 8 miles apart, but the reality of their environs, their neighbors, is not within their scope of communications or priorities. We are, by the nature of our communications and basis for our social fabric, much more at risk than Russians were in the 1990s for strife while we "adjust" to this economic climate. The observations he makes, while comparing even Paul Krugman's blog, seem to point to a very frightening and dismal outlook for our country at this time, and people seem very reluctant to speak of it or acknowledge it or prepare for it despite news rolling out daily of its profound implications for us all. We have become dependent on a system that is breaking down before our very eyes and quietly people remain in their own bubbles of denial until it directly effects them, it seems to me. When I studied psychology over 20 years ago, I learned of a phenomenon of perceived invulnerability that people like to keep in place to prevent themselves from feeling like a negative event could happen to them. Victim-blame it was called. Today it is the safety of the car and the couch perhaps?

Can communities come together and survive? Will helping out neighbors in trouble actually happen? It might happen for some, especially young adults who have resilience and have the physical capabilities of working hard and enduring uncomfortable elements. Even our local library has shut down community communications. Where there were bulletin boards covering the walls by the front doors are now acrylic-covered spaces reserved for messages paid for by commercial endeavors. I found this article among many others that describes how isolated Americans have become. How then, in a disaster, is the community to reach out to one another and form a functioning cooperative? We have become extraordinarily vulnerable, and most people are not staring at this reality in the face. We are trusting grocery stores to be stocked and that our dollar will buy said groceries, then retreating to our homes, numbing our awareness to our position.

What to do? I keep looking for answers to this question. I try not to panic but I have been at times. Buy rice. Not brown but white long grain (lasts longer). Real answers Orlov doesn't offer for individuals. He just spouts wider facts and observations and someone like me with two children and now only one dog and no pet birds who has been stripped of artistic inspiration, with a middle aged body and few connections is left not knowing how to proceed. Paradigm shifting. Crows are flying and landing in the trees around my home and perhaps, with every bailout dollar and plan for recovery, preparing to scavenge every last bit of wealth this country has except what a person can barter. How to proceed...