There's No Tomorrow

Here is an excellent new animated short that ties resource depletion, environmental destruction and the end of growth into a single tidy package. For those of you already versed in this subject matter, this might still be good review; for those of you who don't, PLEASE DON'T PANIC! And when introducing this to people, please remind them that they will need a couple of years to come to terms with this, and should try to not panic in the meantime.

[The following comment has been promoted from the comments due to its excellence.]

 

parkslopegigilo said...

Thank you for that link DO, this film had the oddest effect of making me laugh out loud at the cartoon antics while simultaneously feeling very scared and alone. I want to send it to some friends of mine but it would scare them shitless.

I walked through Times Square today, the Digital Canyon, the High Altar of Waste, and remembered something I had said to a friend years ago while in school. We were both tripping out minds out on LSD and watching CNN. An image of an African man who had been crushed by a tank flashed on the screen and I spent the rest of the night with that image burning like a nugget of molten iron in my mind. Burning, mind you. His legs and lower torso were all that remained, the rest had been neatly cut off and ground to a white speckled bloody paste by the tank's treads.

(Note to all: NEVER do LSD and watch the international news...)

At one point in my very real agony, I turned to my old friend, a lefty like myself and a newshound and a reader of books about US atrocities in South America and Africa etc. and I said

"Do you know how much fucking pain we are letting ourselves in for?"

My point was that the more we learned about the world, the worse it was going to be for us because we would never be able to escape that knowledge. Look at a shiny new gift and you see the starving kids who made it in Taiwan. Thrill at the latest action adventure flick and you come away with a sour aftertaste of militarism, sexism, and racism. Buy a bag of cookies and you buy a bag of pesticides, GMOS, and corn syrup. Nothing can escape your critical eye, including yourself.

The constant whittling away of all illusions, or at least the attempt to do so, changes a person incrementally, so slowly you don't notice but suddenly you are outside of it all. Your critical eye has reached critical mass: now you see all things inside out and upside down that are supposedly right side right.

"Through the veil!" as one old history professor used to say. You no longer get elated at the latest iPhone commercials with your friends or marvel at the magic that is Disney or worship the Kennedy brothers in a secret crypt under the stairs. People begin to suspect something is wrong with you, you openly mock the SuperDuperBowl, you make cracks about Baby Jesus helping you to find your car keys, you refuse to Buy Now!at your local Toyota Deal-Athon dealer. Curmudgeon, Crackpot, Grumpy, the accolades pile up at your feet....

This came back to me as I watched the crowds watching the enormous digital monitors and billboards in the Square. The pain of not being able to slip into the biggest lie of all, the lie that everyone else around you has allowed to flow into and through themselves, that this is somehow an ok situation, that this waste and constant jabber of lies and hucksterism, this smear of harsh light and consumption, body counts and scenic views with advertising, disposable people and trash mountains represents some kind of healthy beating heart of something. I felt a twinge of that old pain, the alienation, the sense of not being plugged into the coolest Kool-Aid around. But then I said "Who fucking cares?" These people are lost, not their fault, they aren't all idiots but rather lost in an illusion, a maze of lies and pictures and warped mirrors. They can't see the man behind the curtain and they sure as fuck cannot see that the machine he is operating is nearing it's breaking point.

But when I watched that damned cartoon tonight it hit again. It's good to know these things because I like to know whats up, I'm a bad news first kind of guy. It's just hard to be the bearer of such knowledge, in a sea of indifference and fantasy. Gaze into the abyss and the abyss gazes into you, right?