Tomorrow is a Wall

THUD.

Comically, that was the first word that came to mind as I put the phone down. Followed by a string of obscenities.

I had called my old buddy Brian at the UN. I had known Brian when he was an intern in Geneva and I was doing my fieldwork at the UNHCHR Office. We had lived in the same foyer, vied for the affections of the same Portuguese translator, who also lived at the foyer, and consoled each other when she chose the French guy working at the ILO. I had saved him from a drunken, topless rollerblader at a pierside disco, and he had gotten me into a strategy meeting for a convention I was analyzing for my dissertation. He had stayed in Geneva, and eventually got to New York, and was pretty high-up in the bureaucracy. I had gone a very different road, but now we were comparing notes like peers, instead of a muckety-muck UN official and a scruffy teacher and bookseller.

I appreciated his frankness. His voice was very strained, and I could tell that parts of the discussion were well-worn from use. He had been doing this all day, telling people what they did not want to hear, with as much economy of words as possible. And he was liking it less each time, because it reaffirmed what was wrong for him with each telling. By the time he had gotten to me, it sounded like he needed to go throw up in a corner.

But he laid it out for me, not just supporting the GEAS report, but telling me some other facts as well. His office processed huge amounts of information for the Secretariat and it turns out he had already been putting some of it together and getting people in contact with each other who could use the information. The report was not a surprise for him, although the timetable was.

And for me as well. Thus the THUD and the title of this post.

Tomorrow means many things for me, from something as cliche as another day to a promise of, if not something new, at least of something continuing. As cynical as I am, I have never considered that there would not be a discernable tomorrow for humanity. We have had the power to annihilate ourselves for the better part of a century with horrifying weapons, but even that was discernable, and with that, preventable. We could see that possibility, and do things to keep it from happening.

But this, this confluence of awful occurences, was not foreseeable as the immediate end of humanity.

I mean, after talking to Brian, it seemed for a few minutes like a bad comic book. Some villain bent on world domination was going to make humanity surrender to his tyrannical whims by unleasing plague and drought and looney henchmen upon us, by using petro-evaporators to dry up the fuel supply. . . . It's just. . . stupid. Hit by a world-killing meteor is one thing, or Skynet nuking us for our arrogance is another, but ignorant global suicide? As stunned as I was by the prediction, and it's increasing validation, I was more staggered by how we had gotten to that point.

If you look, it's all there. All of these seemingly unrelated problems loop back into each other and tighten the noose around our collective necks. We're doing it to ourselves, sometimes unthinkingly. It's not an act of God or a sudden, awful moment of destruction. We are actively participating in our own demise, often through actions that some of think are necessary for survival.

I'm not sure what was worse; reading the GEAS predictions or hearing Brian break it down, with some choice anecdotes culled from years of reading endless stacks of UN reports. Tales of government corruption or shortsightedness combined with food riots and anti-refugee violence into stories of crumbling countries. Basic infrastructures not just faltering, but disintegrating, sometimes being intentionally undermined. What was an annoying delay for me on the 'net was some piece of the greater web of information and communication being corroded for the sake of a political point or vendetta. Not enough food, not enough fuel, not enough land, not enough tolerance or foresight. We were coming up short of everything necessary to keep our species going, and it was all coming together into a huge maelstrom that was going to swallow us up.

THUD.

I now feel like a useless hank of flesh held together by twigs. Heavy, barely able to move, taking up resources like air and nutrients with nothing to give back. Earlier today I did some picking, a bit of cooking, finished a grant proposal just in time to get a call that the entire program has been cancelled. Resource allocation. No educational materials for the kids. And the gardening grants were in jeopardy because the Extension program was about to be seized by the government and brought fully under the Department of Agriculture. There was a rumor that they were actually going to discourage gardening so that local folks would get back into the cash economy a bit more and maybe stimulate farming and food imports.

What the fuck?

If anything is going to solve these problems, it is not going to be money. Money got us into a lot of this mess. It is going to take people doing things for and with each other to get us out.

If that's even possible. I don't right now that it is.