As I’ve mentioned earlier once or twice, one of my favorite bloggers is Atrios of Eschacton (you can google him up as easily as I can put in the links). He blogs about politics and economics, mostly, with some cultural analysis and commentary on urban planning and transportation from time to time. I like that many of his post are what I call dog-bark yelps; one of his typical blog titles (followed by a link to some distressing news about the state of our nation (USA) is “Shit is fucked up and bullshit.”
I have a lot I want to blog about. So much that I get in my own way and trip over myself and end up posting nothing for distressingly long hiati (hiatuses). I have bunch of things half0-written & queued up, but I think my next post will be about some of the remarkably subtle and insightful things my friend Geraldine Brooks said the other night in an informal talk about the American Civil War in general, and her novel March in particular. I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about the Civil War lately, and about how it was the result of 76 years of putting off until tomorrow dealing with the fact that slavery was incompatible with the ideals on which the country was founded.
In 2012, the whole world is, it seems to me, in a situation akin to that of the nation of the United States of America was in 1858 or so. There is a great reckoning to come. Where slavery was the great obvious problem to be resolved in the Civil War, the issues now before us are pan-human economic justice and survival of the planet Earth as a habitable place for all of us. The probability of a happy resolution of both of these issues will be apparent by how the SOPA/PIPA abomination fares in the U.S. Congress, and whether the XL pipeline is built. These will be crucial indicators –which is not to say determinants–of where we are and whither we are tending. In the USA it became tragically apparent that the solution of the problem of slavery (and with it the preservation of the Union) could not be solved without war, war and death on a scale barely conceivable at the time and still hard to comprehend today, 150 years later. But something vastly worse awaits us if we keep putting off until tomorrow the problems that now confront us.
Shit is still so fucked up and bullshit. Damnit, Atrios, you are so right on the money. Anyway, this is a place-holder diary entry to say happy 2012, and may we all be happy and prosper until the Mayan calendar ends and methane plumes erupt from beneath the arctic seas and the permafost melts to a depth of 20 metres and earth becomes Venus. I’ll try to post more soon. I expect my tone will become increasingly abolitionist and strident as time passes, but let’s hope that it all works out. Leave a comment! Let’s get 2012 of to a nice, friendly, low energy start!
Re: the throwaway comment in the final paragraph: the current Alautun of the Mayan calendar doesn’t end for another 63 million years, according to Wikipedia and Fourmilab. All that ends in 2012 is a mere Bak’tun. New era, not eschaton. Like rolling over a century, but their round-number interval is four times as long.
@dglenn
Well that is certainly good to know. However, I fear that the methane plumes under the arctic seas may have misunderstood the calendar. In any event, any comment that includes words like Alautun and Bak’tun is welcome indeed. Thanks!
I empathize regarding writing. I know that that the only answer is to write all the time as if for a diary, but I don’t do it. I abandon stuff I start, not to be completed later, because they are not good enough. I BELIEVE that it’s more important to just write — IT IS A BLOG, after all — but it is not the way I FEEL.
Anyway, although I am deeply concerned — and depressed — about the state of the world, I am not convinced that it is necessary to do something about it. Not right now. I’m not convinced that the Civil War would have been softened had the parties hashed it out earlier. Conversely, I am deeply convinced that the world would NOT have been better if things had been brought to a decisive resolution earlier in the Cold War.
In school I learned that it often pays to procrastinate. Problem sets often had errors that were caught by the people who attacked them first, and the rest of us benefited by waiting a day or two before starting, in case of corrections. On the other hand, the people who struggled were the ones who really learned the material and got “A”s, while it took me and my “B” average 20 years or so to absorb the material. Procrastination indeed.
Here’s my best guess as to a heuristic for The Right And Proper Way To Conduct One’s Affairs: If something is IMPORTANT, by all means get outraged. Discuss it. I’m up for it! Enlist others in the discussion. Or not. But in no case should you ACT until you have The Answer. If you believe you have the right answer, you MUST act, you must tell people about it, and you must enlist others in the fight right away. But if you don’t have the answer, give it some time. Surely what I say is not the path to wealth nor poverty, but I think maybe that just a bit of our world culture is weakened by this artificial state of 1984-style perpetual terror.