Our Dear Little Death Culture 1

One of these days I will just shut off the radio and stop listening to the news for a year.  This isn`t a promise, and not exactly a threat.  I heard this morning on the CBC about oil slowly rising in price again and that it should be a little more profitable by the barrel in, say, twenty-four years.  Meanwhile, the scientists are trying to warn us that we might not have twenty-four years.  We might not have fifteen or even ten years left before climate change has completely destroyed the earth as we know it.  I`m not sure if they`re necessarily right about this, not about the danger but the timing, but I`m sure giving them the benefit of the doubt.

If our political leaders are as serious as they have claimed to be about climate change due to global warming then someone please explain to me why they are still promoting these fuels of death: oil, coal and natural gas?  Prime Minister Junior has finally declared his honeymoon with the Canadian voters to be over by saying that he will approve pipelines carrying oil and liquefied natural gas to the BC coast for Asian (you mean, Chinese?) markets.  Maybe he should start taking off his shirt again?

Of course there is also the car culture.  Every time I watch something on YouTube there are car ads, featuring incredibly shallow, vacuous looking individuals extolling the virtues of their new vehicles.  As if not one of them has ever even heard of global warming or environmental degradation.  They do come across as very ordinary, average, reasonably well-groomed people who like their jobs, their friends, love their families, their girlfriends, boyfriends, their dogs or whatever.  As I said, shallow and vacuous. 

I do not see a reduction of individual vehicles on the road.  Lots of bikes.  Maybe about as many buses.  Skateboards, too.  What is it about our addiction to cars (and to oil, probably the only intelligent thing George W. Bush ever said!)?  It's been suggested that the illusion of power, independence and individualism are so seductive as channelled through the car that not having one reduces you automatically to loser status.  Nobody wants to be a loser.  And the condition of one's ego always takes precedence over the common good.

Do we see a pattern here?  The seduction of egoism and the supremacy of self are in themselves the governing toxic influence in our human lives.  This spills over into everything we do, possess and profess.  The false god of self: the empty, soulless consumer, chronically disembowelled spiritually while trying always but never succeeding to validate the empty craving self.  This is what is really destroying us.  Fill those gas tanks and keep them full and go burn rubber while doing your part, one BMW at a time to make this planet uninhabitable and to do your part to contribute to the extirpation of our species.

And all because you matter more than anything else in the Universe!