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.
Monday, September 30, 2019
Saturday, September 28, 2019
The New Days Feel Old
Woke up early this morning. There are so many roosters in the neighborhood that the cacophony of crowing is hard to ignore. I would have liked more sleep but, hey, there's a lot to do.
I went across the yard to Aoife's house to use her terminal. Kim has been doing some techno-wizardry to our individual computers to provide another layer of security, but mine didn't like it and she needs to straighten it out. Turns out there's a line at Aoife's; Costa's ancient motherboard crapped out again and Bae's house no longer has power. Someone got into NYSEG's database last week and cut the power to all refugees in town. Whatever they did, NYSEG is having trouble undoing, and they may have to revert to removing the wireless gauges from each house in order to get power going again (and actually track the power to make the customer pay for it). And Bae refuses to join the power collective; he wants power all the time, as much as possible.
I think that's pretty boneheaded, all things considered, but some folks just don't look at what's going on around them. He and his family made it out of a bad situation, spent most of their money getting here and getting set up, and now, well, they want to live the American Dream.
Too bad that Dream no longer exists, if it every really did.
He went from a relatively comfortable life as a commodities trader in Singapore (as weather and health and energy all melted away there) to being a funds shuffler for the county. He's the guy who tracks transactions and tallies everyone's resources and watches out for ID theft, moneyghosting, phishing, and echo transfers. It is a complicated job, and there's no way one person can do it, but he says that as long as he catches most of it, he's doing his job. He hates it, and he's already had to deflect several bribery offers, one attempt at blackmail, and a pile of hacks on his home system (which he also keeps separate from our local net, which makes folks suspicious), but it's a job, at least. I envy him that.
But that's not the reason I'm writing this. I can talk about the neighbors later.
So, after about 40 minutes, I get to use the computer. Aoife kindly makes tea for us all while we wait, and I am on my third cup by the time I get to the terminal. I check email, twists, a few blogs, see that LJ has been taken down again and just give up there and delete my account, and struggle to reach each site through the massive layers of filters and popups. Kim is our full-time tech person, and she even gets primo swaps to work overtime, but again, one person just can't do it. She can't run, maintain, and protect 11 computers running on a custom-designed server that probably has more protection than one of those legendary machines in the basement at Fort Meade. She gets by with installing all kinds of baroque layers of protection that make navigation a headache. "Surfing the web" just does not happen anymore. Most sites require sign-up, constant password checks, security scans of your address, and sometimes even human contact. Checking two email accounts, twists, three blogs, and a service site for a project I am writing a grant for takes nearly 40 minutes, and I spend less than two minutes at each site.
I have a headache when I get up from the terminal. Izzy shoots by me and virtually lashes herself to the chair to beat Rudy to it. I can hear their mother Cathleen yellling at them as I leave Aoife's house, a final cup of herbal tea designed especially to deal with post-net headaches in my mug.
I get dizzy as I pass through one of the gardens, and then I realize I did not get to check the news. I swear under my breath and keep walking. Seven of our computers are down, and Aoife's has the best security (a benefit of sleeping with the tech, surely!), so everyone is queued up at her little office now, and there's no way I'm going to get back on that machine before lunchtime.
Gods do I miss radio.
When I get back to the house I decide to do some work before I walk the dog. I have three grant proposals to finish and class prep for the week. I think of the quaint notion of a lazy Sunday and wish I could smile about it. But I heard from the department admin that her counterpart told her that over 900 proposals were solicited for each grant, and only two days after the announcement almost 40 were already in. It was possible that they had a submission cap in mind and that after they reached that number they would close submissions. So, they have to get done. We need supplies for the garden, books for the kids, and I need a job next spring. The Greater Tompkins Educational Consortium would provide all three (the first through its alliance with Cornell Cooperative Extension, the other two on its own). But everything is about grant proposals nowadays. I miss the days of job applications and co-op request forms. . . .
I have everything laid out on my desk. It's daunting; I had to do a lot of reading for the garden proposal because up until this year I did little more than weed, water, and vote for crops. But since Terry never came back from Bermuda (stupid ReDS), all grant-writing has fallen to me. And he was also the best gardener, and Jin hasn't the time to do much more than give me a list of what she needs for next year. But the grants guidelines are really tight; I could honestly lose the proposal by asking for one too many tools or a hundredweight too much of mulch, or something. And we depend too much on the gardens to not get what we need for them next year. I hear talk of local embargos, even higher fuel surcharges for food shipping, and of course the rumors of massive crops of tainted grains. We need to make as much of our own food as we can now.
And that is why I am now sitting here writing this (to be sent later from Aoife's terminal, of course) after just sitting for a half-hour trying to keep it together. It's all too much; everything seems to be happening all at once. I just sat and thought, over and over" "What can one person do?!?!?"
I don't have the answer. I felt a bit better after I realized that. I do not have the answer. No one person has the answer. And if the past several years have taught me something, it is that one person does not have the answer. I look out from my upstairs office over the gardens and solar-catchers of the neighborhood, at empty driveways and cracked roads, at goats grazing in the old playground, and I realize the enormity of the moment we're in, we as in humankind. A lot of mistakes, miscalculations, and deliberate actions have brought us to a critical point. I think that I, and those around me, have spent the last several years reacting, each doing what we can individually, coming together when needed, but not really. . . consolidating, I guess. I read the news as much as I can, read what others are seeing and doing, and I think it's time to take a step forward. It's time to get past the struggling and try to make something.
So, as a first step, I've created this blog, and I hope I can use it to both record what's happening and try to understand better what's going on, and how I and others have created what is happening and how we can shape a better outcome to this huge mess that seems to be drowning us. Yeah, blogging is kind of a silly first step, especially in this age of electronic unreliability, but maybe if we start to communicate with each other not to complain, but to rethink, perhaps we can make some kind of plan to progress, rather than just waste away in place.
Maybe we can take hope, hard-learned lessons, and the experience of this increasingly frightening moment in history, and shape a better tomorrow. Maybe. But until it becomes we and not just a bunch of Is, I am not sure if that can be done.
I went across the yard to Aoife's house to use her terminal. Kim has been doing some techno-wizardry to our individual computers to provide another layer of security, but mine didn't like it and she needs to straighten it out. Turns out there's a line at Aoife's; Costa's ancient motherboard crapped out again and Bae's house no longer has power. Someone got into NYSEG's database last week and cut the power to all refugees in town. Whatever they did, NYSEG is having trouble undoing, and they may have to revert to removing the wireless gauges from each house in order to get power going again (and actually track the power to make the customer pay for it). And Bae refuses to join the power collective; he wants power all the time, as much as possible.
I think that's pretty boneheaded, all things considered, but some folks just don't look at what's going on around them. He and his family made it out of a bad situation, spent most of their money getting here and getting set up, and now, well, they want to live the American Dream.
Too bad that Dream no longer exists, if it every really did.
He went from a relatively comfortable life as a commodities trader in Singapore (as weather and health and energy all melted away there) to being a funds shuffler for the county. He's the guy who tracks transactions and tallies everyone's resources and watches out for ID theft, moneyghosting, phishing, and echo transfers. It is a complicated job, and there's no way one person can do it, but he says that as long as he catches most of it, he's doing his job. He hates it, and he's already had to deflect several bribery offers, one attempt at blackmail, and a pile of hacks on his home system (which he also keeps separate from our local net, which makes folks suspicious), but it's a job, at least. I envy him that.
But that's not the reason I'm writing this. I can talk about the neighbors later.
So, after about 40 minutes, I get to use the computer. Aoife kindly makes tea for us all while we wait, and I am on my third cup by the time I get to the terminal. I check email, twists, a few blogs, see that LJ has been taken down again and just give up there and delete my account, and struggle to reach each site through the massive layers of filters and popups. Kim is our full-time tech person, and she even gets primo swaps to work overtime, but again, one person just can't do it. She can't run, maintain, and protect 11 computers running on a custom-designed server that probably has more protection than one of those legendary machines in the basement at Fort Meade. She gets by with installing all kinds of baroque layers of protection that make navigation a headache. "Surfing the web" just does not happen anymore. Most sites require sign-up, constant password checks, security scans of your address, and sometimes even human contact. Checking two email accounts, twists, three blogs, and a service site for a project I am writing a grant for takes nearly 40 minutes, and I spend less than two minutes at each site.
I have a headache when I get up from the terminal. Izzy shoots by me and virtually lashes herself to the chair to beat Rudy to it. I can hear their mother Cathleen yellling at them as I leave Aoife's house, a final cup of herbal tea designed especially to deal with post-net headaches in my mug.
I get dizzy as I pass through one of the gardens, and then I realize I did not get to check the news. I swear under my breath and keep walking. Seven of our computers are down, and Aoife's has the best security (a benefit of sleeping with the tech, surely!), so everyone is queued up at her little office now, and there's no way I'm going to get back on that machine before lunchtime.
Gods do I miss radio.
When I get back to the house I decide to do some work before I walk the dog. I have three grant proposals to finish and class prep for the week. I think of the quaint notion of a lazy Sunday and wish I could smile about it. But I heard from the department admin that her counterpart told her that over 900 proposals were solicited for each grant, and only two days after the announcement almost 40 were already in. It was possible that they had a submission cap in mind and that after they reached that number they would close submissions. So, they have to get done. We need supplies for the garden, books for the kids, and I need a job next spring. The Greater Tompkins Educational Consortium would provide all three (the first through its alliance with Cornell Cooperative Extension, the other two on its own). But everything is about grant proposals nowadays. I miss the days of job applications and co-op request forms. . . .
I have everything laid out on my desk. It's daunting; I had to do a lot of reading for the garden proposal because up until this year I did little more than weed, water, and vote for crops. But since Terry never came back from Bermuda (stupid ReDS), all grant-writing has fallen to me. And he was also the best gardener, and Jin hasn't the time to do much more than give me a list of what she needs for next year. But the grants guidelines are really tight; I could honestly lose the proposal by asking for one too many tools or a hundredweight too much of mulch, or something. And we depend too much on the gardens to not get what we need for them next year. I hear talk of local embargos, even higher fuel surcharges for food shipping, and of course the rumors of massive crops of tainted grains. We need to make as much of our own food as we can now.
And that is why I am now sitting here writing this (to be sent later from Aoife's terminal, of course) after just sitting for a half-hour trying to keep it together. It's all too much; everything seems to be happening all at once. I just sat and thought, over and over" "What can one person do?!?!?"
I don't have the answer. I felt a bit better after I realized that. I do not have the answer. No one person has the answer. And if the past several years have taught me something, it is that one person does not have the answer. I look out from my upstairs office over the gardens and solar-catchers of the neighborhood, at empty driveways and cracked roads, at goats grazing in the old playground, and I realize the enormity of the moment we're in, we as in humankind. A lot of mistakes, miscalculations, and deliberate actions have brought us to a critical point. I think that I, and those around me, have spent the last several years reacting, each doing what we can individually, coming together when needed, but not really. . . consolidating, I guess. I read the news as much as I can, read what others are seeing and doing, and I think it's time to take a step forward. It's time to get past the struggling and try to make something.
So, as a first step, I've created this blog, and I hope I can use it to both record what's happening and try to understand better what's going on, and how I and others have created what is happening and how we can shape a better outcome to this huge mess that seems to be drowning us. Yeah, blogging is kind of a silly first step, especially in this age of electronic unreliability, but maybe if we start to communicate with each other not to complain, but to rethink, perhaps we can make some kind of plan to progress, rather than just waste away in place.
Maybe we can take hope, hard-learned lessons, and the experience of this increasingly frightening moment in history, and shape a better tomorrow. Maybe. But until it becomes we and not just a bunch of Is, I am not sure if that can be done.
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