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Friday, April 8, 2011


the age of oil

Since I've become aware of the thousand years of peace the other side of all this that we're going through now as one of the waves in civilization, perhaps the biggest one ever, I've come to see what I "knew" was the case anyway, it all has to be. The industrial revolution goes with oil. An age of mechanical gadgetry goes with oil. The wealth a few people accumulate would not be there without oil. Oil is limited in amount. We're at a place now, today, where humanity has used half the oil available. It took about a century and a half to use up the first half, and it's looking like the 2nd half will go a whole lot faster than that, 50 or less. The educated projections are less than that, like ten and twenty. Asia has become an economic factor in the world. Cars and industry are new there. They are not going to pollute any less than we already have, because we already have.

When oil goes away, the entire economy created by oil will go away. Like during the consumption of the first half of the oil on earth, we gradually learned to live in the oil economy. By this time the glut of what we've come to believe we need is beginning to drag us down. Just the weight of it. From here on, we'll be learning to live less expensively, without jobs, without cars, without tv, without. It won't happen all at once. We'll have time to figure a lot of things out. We already have the knowledge we need for a time without oil, like making electricity without coal or natural gas. There will always be electricity, but not like now. For one thing, it takes rubber insulation around the copper wires, insulation. Computers are jut about all plastic. No more Barbie dolls. Artists will have to learn to make their own paint again. Everybody will have a garden, perhaps all available land around the house, formerly the yard.

What's wrong with that? People who keep gardens often keep flowers too. Stuart and Myrtle Taylor in Whitehead have a beautiful flower bed beside the road with their garden. Now we don't have time for flowers except to buy them. They'll be back. When somebody learns how to grow things, growing flowers becomes part of it. Maybe every house would have flowers on the table during the growing season, most of the year. It wouldn't be sissy, because we wouldn't be ruled by warrior mind any more. That mind will have had its time in history. The world has at least as many peaceable people as war loving people. That thousand years of peace will be the time for rule by the way of peace. Like the earth turns, day and night, "opposites" take turns in this world of duality.

We live pretty well in peace here where we are in the mountains, losing friends and/or relatives in war the only real connection we have with the wars that the warlords keep outside our borders--unless the South goes to acting up again. But our societies are still ruled by warlords all over the globe, which determines an awful lot about our cultures that value the warrior's ideal. The shit boys have to go through growing up that's supposed to make you tough, makes boys and girls so angry for life they can't do anything but flail about fighting and abusing from insatiable anger, keeping wife miserable, kids miserable until they gradually learn it's their place to take it. It's not that way with everyone, of course, nor even nearly everyone. There's enough of it going around in the working class, the warrior class, to create a culture of anger in the next generation, the next and the next for at least 6,000 years of recorded history, and several tens of thousands before that.

Nerd boys (good name for a band), the ones whose souls are meant for peace, grow up picked on by the boys getting the shit beat out of them at home, expressing their anger picking on kids who want to be left alone. Columbine et al happened because the schools enabled the bullies. School systems don't like nerds either. They like jocks and tough guys, people fit to be successes in the warrior society that pays the principal, administration and teachers, who want to live in peace too, but understand it's our warriors that keeps us free, actually living in peace. It's how we have to do it in a world where everybody needs an industrial military complex for backup, which we call "freedom." Like the invasion of Iraq called Iraqi Freedom. I wonder how many Iraqis would call it freedom besides the ones on the American payroll.

Nerds may rule in the thousand years of peace and the boys of warrior mind will be the outsiders like the nerds are now. Nobody wants to be a warrior. You just can't help it if you're born of warrior mind and it makes you such a misfit the nerds pick on you. "Your mind destroyed the world, Mister!" The warrior-minded from birth who can't help it have to learn to live in a society that doesn't allow for them. Warrior mind is old-fashioned. It's what people used to do. Seeing this as the next turn of the wheel of fortune where all of us are concerned, it makes the noise I hear on the news less urgent. I see the time we're in as the end of warrior mind as a social force we all must kow-tow to for our acceptance in the world around us. It will be good to live in a time when Peace is valued as something other than a Christmas card cliche. At least it's kept alive somewhere.


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