Collective Trauma: The Fallout 22

It is only natural that we are going to try to escape, run away, distract ourselves with little absurdities. We don't want to face the tragic reality that stares us down our noses every day. We re too weak, too frail. too shallow. We are very delicate, we humans. And so full of hubris. We are also very destructive. Look what we've been doing to this planet. And yet we keep on multiplying, since sex is such an effective soporific for keeping us drugged and we use birth control only when it really suits our needs, not those of the planet. Here, in Canada, we have a negative birthrate, which means that without constant immigration, our population will go on shrinking, so we import hordes of immigrants from countries bursting at the seems, and many of them, for example the Philippines, are strongly Catholic nations, or there is some other conservative ethos going on that inhibits birth control, so they just keep having kids and we get the surplus. It's win-win, I suppose, but the global population keeps on growing. And it is rather cynical to suppose that the poorer countries exist primarily as breeding centres to keep the rich countries like Canada provided with good cheap labour to keep fattening our economy god. But that's really what our politicos want for us. I don't think they really are that interested in multiculturalism, though I for one agree that diversity is good for our country. They just want to keep the economy growing and then they try to pretty things up by selling us on the beauty of diversity. And most of us swallow it, because, of course, diversity is beautiful. But it's still no less a cynical ploy. And this also robs developing countries of brain power to help them keep moving forward, and this is where I start to see red. Why should the loss of bright, educated, strong and healthy Filipinos, Chinese, Mexicans and Peruvians have to be their own countries loss in order to be our gain, when we are already an incredibly wealthy and developed nation? Why can't more be done to help people stay in their own countries and use their gifts and their strength and intelligence to build their own societies. But of course they all feel hamstrung by the corruption and backwardness of their own societies, and they really want to feel freer, live and breathe freer and move ahead in life, which is going to be much more likely in a country like Canada than in India or in Bangladesh. So Canada benefits and the other places continue to languish. And we still keep multiplying, putting all kinds of stress on the planet and strain on our own infrastructures because we really should have blown the whistle on our rabbit-instinct shortly after we hit one billion, but this is not going to happen. Our instinct to reproduce and pass on our genetic material is so encoded in our genes that this is one big fat inevitable and I don't think that we are going to get through this one until it is too late, until we have passed the point of no return and our burgeoning numbers create the biggest environmental collapse in this planet's history and then....well, anything could happen. I think our species is going to survive, but in greatly reduced numbers, and the fallout is going to be so severe that our descendants just may end up forgetting much of the millennia of culture, learning and civilization that we have developed since the caves were being painted in Spain and in France and we have to start over again in various degraded states of abject savagery (oh shut up, Politically Correct Thought Police! Context, okay? Nothing wrong with the word savagery, it's all about context!) So maybe a few thousand years of reverting to a new Old Stone Age would be just the thing to get Mother Earth back in shape, before our distant descendants gather enough knowledge again to make an even bigger mess of things some ten or twenty thousand years in the future? Who only knows. But in the meantime, we are going to keep on distracting ourselves, keep playing with our yoyos or playing with ourselves (stop it, or you'll go blind!). It isn't that most of us don't care, or that we don't want to care. I think we're afraid of caring, because to care is something very costly. We will be obliged to actually do something about it, to get out of our comfort zone and actually do something to effect change, any kind of change, and this is going to be the most costly thing that we will have ever done. It is sad, downright depressing to think that our species may be hurtling towards oblivion, and all because most of us are just too selfish and too afraid to care. We don't want to give up our transient comforts. We will only carry risk as far as the casino, an extreme sport, or getting the next travel destination off our bucket list. Nothing else matters. And if this kind of thinking doesn't begin to really change, and soon, then not only are we doomed, but we are going to deserve to be doomed.