each day feels like a train wreck
sometimes it's exciting
because it was a train full of bankers, automobiles, and corporate retailers
sometimes it hurts
because it was the train you were riding
and I wake up the next day
sore or sober to another derailment
whistles blowing
sirens screaming
metal and men strewn about
in crispy spring sunlight
DEPARTURES/ARRIVALS
how can anyone doubt that the entire fabric of this civilization is falling apart
yes, a reason to rejoice
but as anyone who's ever experienced a bad automobile accident knows
you don't pick yourself up from the wreckage, knock the dust off your shoulder
and go on with your daily life
there is shock
and trauma
that hangs
on you
ALL ABOARD
Why are we not angry? I feel like I should be gravely disappointed in the generations that preceded me - at my parents, the boomers - the generation of greed - whose manic desire for luxury and excess has at last ruined the world. They're the ones who built the sprawling suburbs of cheap and uniform model homes, spent their weekends motoring around to flex their several credit cards in shopping malls and their nights on the sofa flipping station to station while shoveling their mouths full of fast and easy factory food. Thank you, mom and dad, for making the world I've grown up in a total shit show train wreck. I really wish you knew better. And if you did, I really wish you had tried harder to change things. But now I just watch you decay in your McMansions with the pitiful and wasteful world you built around you...
...which gives me even more of a reason to ensure that things change or the world I pass to the next generation will be even worse and they'll wonder the same thing: why didn't they do anything to stop this? how could you leave me with this wasteland!?
FULL SPEED AHEAD
I read a few articles in the New York Times tonight. Some worthy quotes from an article on the death of conspicuous consumption:
Maxine Frankel, 59, a high school teacher from Skokie, Ill., said, “I think this economy was a good way to cure my compulsive shopping habit. It’s kind of funny, but I feel much more satisfied with the things money can’t buy, like the well-being of my family. I’m just not seeking happiness from material things anymore.”
“It’s kind of like we all went overboard,” said Ms. Taylor, 33. “And we’re trying to get back to where we should have been.”
“Though the recession was always talked about in economic terms, we felt really strongly that, in fact, it was a crisis of culture,” said Tracy Johnson.
Ms. Johnson has advised clients to focus on quality rather than quantity. Malls redecorated in screaming red “sale” signs are not the way to go, she said, because “if you just give people the opportunity to buy more, you’re not matching up to where their minds are.”
Carol Morgan, who teaches law at the University of Georgia and whose husband has a private law practice, said she felt a responsibility to cut needless spending. “That is probably something that is a prudent thing to do in any event, but particularly now I see it as the right thing, as the moral thing to do,” she said.
“It’s disrespectful to the people who don’t have much to flaunt your wealth,” said Monica Dioda Hagedorn, 40, a lawyer in Atlanta. “Everyone’s going to pull through together, or everyone’s going to sink together.”
Sounds like some of the boomers finally get it... finally...
And a few more from another article by the Times' boomer voice of reason, Thomas Friedman:
We can’t do this anymore. “We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children.”
“You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate ...’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”
“When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history. Our children and grandchildren will ask us, ‘What was it like? What were you doing when it started to fall apart? What did you think? What did you do?’ ”
MAYDAY MAYDAY
what world will we wake up to tomorrow? there are still so many trains hurtling forward on paths of destructive progress, each one a whistle blow away from becoming wreckage and without brakes, because they were never installed.
I'm already sick of weathering this shit storm and it's only just begun. But the reaping of the rotting fields, vast and superfluous as they are, must continue. We must let it all fall apart and die, even as it disrupts our lives in the present and as things proceed to get worse – because they most certainly will. Hell, we should even do our best to make sure they fall apart, die, and don't come back. Where's the exterminators when you need 'em?
Before I shut my eyes for the night only to wake up to more chaos tomorrow, I can only hope that I live through this great collapse to see better days and that the life I have lived was for the lives of those yet to come – that they may live in a better world than the one I was given by my recent ancestors.
