Stepping Back From Collapse

A few weeks ago, I stopped over at Aunt Tomato’s for a cup of tea and a treat involving cake and ice cream. I refrained from sweeping crumbs on the floor. AT says that the “coffee pot’s always on.” Those aren’t just words—she means it and I’m enjoying having her only 6 miles away, across the river, instead of living in a neighboring state.

AT and I have been going round and round about what we refer to as “collapse.” If you aren’t a reader of blogs by James Kunstler, Morris Berman, and John Michael Greer, I’ll excuse you now, as this may or may not make much sense to you. However, if you’ll hang with me for a few more paragraphs, I think it might start hitting home with some of you, even if you’re not well-versed in the collapse industrial complex. Some of you might connect with my premise that social media and all its attendant promises are as filled with rocks as Charlie Brown’s Halloween bag. More on that in a little bit.

AT surprised me a bit two weeks ago when she told me that while she knows that working for Whitey the Man for enough shekels to keep a roof over her head can be frustrating and sometimes damn near impossible to deal with, overall, she’s happy with the things that Whitey allows her to have with the scraps he offers from his table. That’s American capitalism 101, really. She’s also not going to try to single-handedly save the world, either. Preach it sista!

On this particular day, I threw out a “what if” scenario, given our history of talking about men in tinfoil hats that implied that perhaps everything collapse-centric was designed to get us all to give up and stop enjoying the beauty in life, and the attendant joys that life lived on this side of paradise has to offer. I could tell that she was seriously pondering what I was offering up.

Collapse is more than the zombie apocalypse.

Collapse is more than the zombie-apocalypse.

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Charlie Baker’s War

For the last nine days it’s been snowing in New England. These haven’t been Alberta Clippers, either.

First, there was the Blizzard of 2015, which dumped upwards of 30 inches over Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Boston, New England’s urban hub, has been especially hard hit. The city’s received 73.9 inches of snow over the past two weeks. Compounding historic snows in a short period have been narrow streets, the need to get rid of the snow without a place to put it, drivers unaccustomed to snowfall totals of this magnitude, and epic public transportation failures. These have been vexing to newly elected governor of the Commonwealth, Charlie Baker.

Poor Charlie Baker; his term is off to a rough start.

Poor Charlie Baker; his term is off to a rough start.

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