A Curious Thing

I will be forever shocked by folks who can't seem to get the idea of unsustainable through into their brains.

Let's talk about the way that we live our lives here in the US.  Specifically, lets talk about the idea of success.  The US, being a thoroughgoing and completely bourgeois society rates success as the height of the pile of what will be garbage in the future and the cost of the same.

I am going to talk about folks my age now.  The older folks lived in a different world with different resource availability and different population profiles.  They operated on a planet that was well away from the limits we face.  Their actions did accelerate society into the increasingly fragile state we now inhabit.

I look at 1972 as the point where we went wrong.  Going wrong was an easy thing to do at that time.  There was so much more cushion and room for error than there is now.   The hippies had pointed the way and had just begun to retreat from the back-to-the-land hippiness after finding out, much to their chagrin, just how hard the land was to go back to.

This is when I first came in contact with the rules of physics and the book "The Limits of Growth".   That is when I realized that it just wasn't built to last.

After the Nixon mess (The hatred of Trumpy is every bit as bad as the hatred of Dicky) we elected a good man who was smart enough to see what lay ahead and warn us.  Well, we got rid of him lickety-split.  Anyone who has the termerity to understand the  second law of thermodynamics had no place in OUR White House, Nosiree.

Then we got back to old us we could have anything that we wanted.  From there we have made a somemn pact among the voters of this country to not have anything to do with anyone who mentions that we can't have everything that we want.

That is the legacy my generation leaves.  An America where constraints and limits are not important.  Where the desire for "Mine" outweighs any idea of leaving some for others and for the future.

The younglings are waking up to our bullshit.  They are realizing that they are on the hook for promises made three or four generations ago when we weren't bumping up against the limits.  They will have a pretty bad go of it, I don't blame them if they cut us loose and break the promises made for them by a bygone society that only looked to its own wants.