Black Friday: Why This One is Especially Dark

[babylonsister]

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/11/24/black_friday_why_this_one_is_especially_

Black Friday: Why This One is Especially Dark
Carolyn Baker


A few moments ago I posted on my site the MSNBC version of "The Coming Consumer Crunch" which forecasts severe and painful belt-tightening for American families in 2008. Then when I checked my inbox, a Truthout bulletin listing Kelpie Wilson's latest article "Give Thanks For Oil" appeared. One paragraph leapt out at me:

Why should we give thanks that the future holds no cheap oil? There are several reasons, but the first is that cheap oil has fueled a 50-year-long party in the industrialized West that has left us with an unsustainable economy that is wrecking the planet. The recent awareness of global warming is beginning to put a damper on our out-of-control binge, but not fast enough to slow the heating of the planet. Rising oil prices will force a cutback in consumption. Rising oil prices will also chill the fantasy of endless growth and force us to confront the reality of planetary limits.

I have no crystal ball, nor do I claim to have well-developed psychic powers, but I'd be willing to bet almost anything that next Thanksgiving season will be dramatically different from this one. A dark curtain of despair has descended, along with $100 oil, on Wall Street, and the amount of debt that the American working and middle classes are trying to juggle is, as Stan Goff so eloquently stated in his article on my site, "Middle Class Angst", nothing less than "pre-volcanic."

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These are the "good ole days" to be remembered when we have almost nothing that we now take for granted or feel entitled to. And at the same time, these are dark new days that begin and end amid the sea change occurring all around us. That darkness signals and end to holidays as we have known them. This year, like all those other years, we will lament that despite our best intentions, we ate too much. In what year will we remember Thanksgivings of the past and weep and salivate as we search for whatever morsels of food we can find? I am convinced that absolutely nothing will awaken Americans except starvation, but by the time they have arrived at that horrifying circumstance, it will be far too late.

In these dark new days when readers email me with questions or arguments about aliens or engage in nit-picking philosophical posturing, I refuse to respond with anything other than the following questions: What will you do when you have no food to eat and no water to drink? How will you obtain healthcare when it no longer exists? What have you done to liberate yourself from debt? Where are you living and how sustainable is it? If you need to relocate, why haven't you done so? I then refer them to the Survival Acres banner ad at the top of my site and the Preparedness Store at Matt Savinar's site. In other words, does it really matter what I or anyone else thinks about aliens or what method of intellectual masturbation we prefer when we have no food or water?

These are the good ole days, my friend, and these are also the dark new days. Happy Thanksgiving; savor every bite.