Uh-oh…looks like someone needs to take away Bruce Gagnon’s belt and shoelaces:
We all at times feel like all is lost. Global warming is overwhelming….the dolphins committing suicide by the hundreds by beaching themselves is probably happening because they are telling us the ocean is polluted and they can’t stand it any longer…..humans just rush down to the beach and try to shove them back into the water thinking they are doing something noble….or maybe it is the Navy’s underwater sonar that is literally blowing the minds of the dolphins…..but we need the Navy, right? We’ve got to have the big advanced, high tech Navy to protect us from the Chinese…….Or how about the polar bears that are now drowning because as the icebergs melt they have to swim farther from one iceberg to the next to find their food? We are all complicit in this destruction of life and yet we just go on like nothing is happening….some feel powerless and some just don’t really care anymore.
Some of us are already dead inside….we’ve given up feeling responsible….oh well we say, it was nice while we were here….let the cockroaches take over. And forget about getting upset that Bush is thinking of using a nuclear weapon to hit Iran….?nothing I can do about that? we say to ourselves.
This is what happens when your culture has become militarized….our minds become colonized by the militarists and we just turn everything over to them…..we just give up, the fight goes out of us, and we turn dead inside…..dead people walking around.
It always comes back to the military for Bruce, the way it’s always the Joooooos for other people.
I think he’s trying to say that this despair over the state of the world is a common and widespread sentiment, but it comes across as a statement of his own mental state:
What does it mean to be human? How can I be a real person again? What do I do now?
So what is the solution to the crises Bruce sees all around himself?
To be alive would require that we feel the hurt….that we actually allow the pain and suffering of drowning polar bears to reach into our insides and rip our hearts out…that it would motivate us to skip the car for just one day and hop on the bike…that we might begin to talk with others about creating community housing where we share a home with others, that we share our washing machines, our vacuum cleaners, our cars….that we begin to try to figure out a new way to live on this very fragile Earth……Maybe by killing the illusions that we live in a democracy, that America is a free and honest country, that technology will save us from the oil crisis, maybe if we allowed those illusions to die we could live again.
Maybe we would become free again if we killed the American dream that the mental colonizers planted in our hearts and brains from our first days in school.
Kill kill kill! Such violent words from a self-professed pacifist. Must be the residual “mental colonization” from his compulsory military service and military-brat childhood leaking out.
On the other hand, maybe he just doesn’t go far enough — if things are really all that desperate, and America is to blame, why stop at killing illusions or killing the American dream if you can eliminate America itself? If everyone in America simply accepted the despair he feels believes they ought to feel and committed suicide, why…the source of all the world’s ills would disappear overnight. All the citizens of the globe could breathe a sigh of relief, join hands for a round of “Kumbayaa”, and build up from the ruins of the physical, ecological, and spiritual devastation wrought by America’s racist colonialist fascist corporatist capitalist system a shiny new utopia, one powered by solar and wind power, where Hoovers and cars are shared with a smile, where folks gather ’round the communal washing machine for conversation in good cheer, where six billion blossoms of brotherly love bloom, freed from all oppression, inequality, and want by the passing of America and Americans from the scene. This paradise on Earth could be real, if only America weren’t standing in the way — America, the font of all things wicked in the world, which in all its history has brought the world nothing but misery and despair, and has never once done anything to justify its shameful existence.
Of course, mass suicide isn’t going to happen — thankfully, most Americans are not like Bruce’s flock, foolish and persuadable (and self-loathing) enough to accept the existential guilt he preaches. Instead of “conversion” of the Military-Industrial Complex™ to the production of mass trainsit railcars and windmills and whatnot, maybe he should be crusading for its conversion into a giant Kevorkian Machine that could administer a national “assisted suicide” as an act of mercy to Gaia and the rest of humanity.
