So re-reading through my first week of posts, I see the arising theme of the decaying liberal order and the growing specter of fear for the state of the future, and I wanted to cut it off sharp. Aside from the daily deluge of dumb news contstanly streaming in, I’m also currently reading Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich and just finished Hugh Trevor-Roper’s essential The Last Days of Hitler, and so one can imagine the frame of mind in which that might place me. To truly fear for the times, one need only study up on the rise of the last Reich.
I don’t want to get to wrapped up in all that and what it means to me and, as I see it, what it means for our shared future. I actually want to talk about seaweed, that amazing plant, and what it means for our future, but I must first bring our attention to the closing paragraph from the foreword of The Last Days of Hitler, published in 1946, written by the Marshall of the R.A.F.:
It is not for me to attempt to point lessons to be drawn from
the horrid madhouse which was Hitler’s court, or from the
fantastic debacle which is depicted in this record. I can only
be unutterably thankful that the lunatic devotion of the mad-
man’s judgment pervaded every aspect of German activity.
Never before has the truth of the old saying been so conclu-
sively borne out, “Whom the Gods wish to destroy they first
make mad.” May no nation in the world ever again allow itself
to be led by a megalomaniac.
How can anyone read that, particularly the last sentence, and not feel a cold dread trickle right down their spine?
Anyways, on to the topic of the day: seaweed.
Nobody should despair for our agricultural long-term future. The short-term period of change, now that’s likely to be quite painful and a period of real growing pains, just as with all aspects of global-warming in general, but the world that will come afterwards will be all the better for the change, as always. I see this truth exemplified in seaweed.
Growing in popularity across the US as a light snack when on-the-go, anyone who has tried the paperthin little sheets knows immediately why they grow so popular. Scratching the same itch as is normally relieved by the potato chip, seaweed offers a tasty and healthy alternative that grows in the oceans that slowly creep across an ever larger area of the earth.
I’m sorry, I don’t think I can do this. I am really struggling to turn my focus towards seaweed. Like looking away from an erupting volcano to get back to working on my taxes, I cannot help but feel like the real crisis is the lava coming creeping down towards the house and not whether or not I can claim my car as an expense. The lava flow seems slow when you see it without threat far away, on film, yet it will eventually hit civilization, and it’s funny how immediate and dire the chaos can turn on a dime. These are my feelings of the times, so it’s hard to go back to debating about how best to do our taxes. The seaweed is there, it is an amazing plant, and anyone who takes a second to look at it will appreciate that fact, but is that where I want to focus? Want isn’t the right word there, because it is where I want to focus, but I just can’t bring myself to fix my gaze uninterrupted on something so seemingly trivial. It offers a solution to some of the agricultural troubles we have looming, but people already know this and work towards making seaweed mainstream. My writing about it just educates the ignorant a moment before they would otherwise be educated by just seeing the seaweed in the shops and on menu items with more regularity in the times yet to come.
Sorry, fallen into rant mode again, but surely by now you’re beginning to pick up that this will be the run of these things. We don’t get order or fluid thoughts, we just get the brain dump of curious connection, the undirected flow of consciousness and all the troubles it brings.
Troubles should be familiar to us all these days.
Not even that the times are troubling, more so that we are now acknowledging the unhealthy habits that have long attached themselves to mankind as part-and-parcel of the pricetag to civilization. Civilization grows and adapts, learns to face the needs demanded, and we here today experiencing this transition are just blessed to live in a period of flux. All such periods are chaos in the moment, and struggles for the individuals that must endure them, but look longer and one cannot help but feel excitement at the dawn to come. I look with eager anticipation at the world of 50 years from now, when I will sit around with current generations’ descendants enjoying Christmas dinner.
What will that meal look like? Will there still be the aspect of gifts and materialism, or will we have moved fully past this phase of our gluttony of things? Will there be turkey or will veganism have become the mainstream with full moral acceptance? If there is a turkey, will it be natural or lab-grown? How will we all get to our holiday destinations? Will we drive ourselves or just plug it into our car to drive itself while we nap? Will we even leave our houses, or will we just plug in a headset that creates a reality so seemingly real that we won’t even feel the need to actually travel? Will there even be a Christmas? Will there even be a society to celebrate?
The world in flux as it is, these are all impossible questions with only time as an answer, and that leaves so many of us scared. It just makes me feel free. The world can and will be radically different from current habits of reality, and we each of us has the power to radically change how it may look on both an individual and social level. The rules are becoming unwrit across the board, and all that means is that we get to rewrite them as we imagine they should have always initially have been set. We get to create the reality we hoped our parents would have created for us, so that our children, and more importantly our grandchildren, will reap the rewards of a world created with their experience of it’s offerings at heart.
All I see around us is fear and worry, and it is hard to call wrong as all the forces of authority seem to be pushing us there, but look long and see the opportunity, and quickly the light of hope begins shining. The coral reefs begin to bounce back, the oceans return the fight, and even the weeds of the seas offer solutions to the problems of the land.
It seems my initial thesis with this essay was wrong: I cannot escape discussing the larger running/ruining of things, the state of Old World decay and New World rising. That will forever by my operating theme, and to this we must all resign ourselves. Mine is the lot of the ranters and ravers, mine is the boon of the sages.