To: Morgan and Annie, from James Lambert in address to the Koyaanisqatsi Sword of our existence.
Morgan I was drawn here by your Music Post "Has anything changed". My succinct answer is: racism has been classified. And I mean it in every double meaning and triple meaning of the words.
I've viewed your and Ammie's profiles to get an idea to whom I am writing and believe you to both be interesting, intelligent and wise souls. I feel that I am in the right place amongst kindred sentients to be responding to your question about the inescapable sense of an impending "systemic-wobble-into-crooked-failure" .... out of balance, feeling.
Yes indeed, I feel it too most days. When I don't feel it it is because I am distracted. The green term is sweeter: an inherited insustainability, like when riding with a mad man in a car and he hands you a half filled fifth of cheap whiskey (which you were unaware he was drinking) and yells: "Watch this!" as he drives off the road and into a ragging river. I am 62 years old and I have felt the same thing for much of my life. I also instantly recognized the metaphor of the Sword of Damocles story that I first encountered in my Latin class when I was 14. It lives with you. The ancients were fighting the very same issues that we are today ....exactly. Nothing has changed (which also refers to the top of this page about your question).
It amazes me that nobody has joined the two of you on this post when it seems to me to be a profound omnipresent feeling in the world. This is a profound post. Maybe no one knows you exist here? Are we mad or is everyone else just in denial? As Annie points out, the deep sense of chaos is in our music, even in a way the allure of being out of control is starting to be desired, as in: let's get it over with already!
The earthlings of power have unintentionally set up an ingenious scheme to scare the crap out of anyone who dares think about the realities of our economic and political systems. The basic structures of balance are obviously not doing very well and it has the madness of an Alice in Wonderland dream world of self destructive grotesques chuckling behind fans folded out of investment portfolios.
I do not have any encouragement to offer whatsoever. I am bewildered and stunned by the silence of the feeling of impending horrors too. I know of solutions but they would never be acceptable to those who have so heavily bet, wagered and invested in their self destruction. I've thought of a metaphor, a construct that might help but I have no faith in it in the faces of the grotesques.
Morgan, you described the feeling convincingly for me. That you can describe it speaks well of hope for a new generation that may have the ability to change it. The only mollifying information that I can contribute is that history (the written word over centuries) is that every century in history felt this same thing, the feeling of their society being out of balance and feeling alarmed. Revelations in the Bible is just one example of it but there were many from various religions and cultures. Oh, another encouraging thing to acknowledge is that over the centuries those people who were not feeling the unsettled feeling of change and did not feel like everything was on the brink of collapse would not have recorded anything at all ... so we don't have records of civilizations writing to us in the wake of their future: "Hey you people who will follow us, everything is quiet and dependable and good right now so eat your mud pies, you jerks!" It would have never entered their minds to communicate a non threat.
Personally, I think that nuclear weapons are our main self threat. Everything else: the religious stuff, the resource sharing issues, food, over population issues, all of such things we will work out provided we don't cook ourselves with radiation.
