Entry #3 Our Universal Apathetic Nature

When I take my daily commute along Thunderbird Ave, close to the I-17, I always seem to take notice of a specific little spillway near the Northeast corner of 31st ave and Thunderbird. Why? Because it generally gets clusterfucked with an insane amount of garbage and debris. This would seem odd if I hadn't already witnessed scenes like this throughout the city. I've gone on walks through washes near Happy Valley and 67th ave and saw several truckloads worth of broken tile and concrete heaved into the middle of them. When I go hiking near Shaw Butte I see a million Polar Pop cups and beer cans littering the desert with a frightening abundance. Yet scenes like these seem to capture the attention of virtually no one because we've come to accept it as a symptom of normalcy, and probably because we haven't experienced yet what kind of cataclysmic summation should occur when our mass naïveté remains in a fixed state.

Seeing images of a desolate planet, skyscrapers made of waste, and void of a runaway human race in movies like 'Wall-E', don't strike me as being anything entirely far-fetched. Humankind is shown as a fat, sheltered, dopey flock of space-dwelling citizens who live in some kind of Viacom-wet-dream-fantasy-space-station. Their total existence predicated upon only by their own marketability.

I'm watching Wall-E, with my 3 year old daughter, and I'm curious as to when I have to answer the question, "Dad, is that what the Earth is going to look like soon?".  What the hell should I say? "Well, uhhhhh, no honey, you're too young to worry about those things, here's the iPad, go play." Should I not be honesty with her, and tell her that I think a trend like we're on could certainly have devastating consequences not just hundreds of years from now, but even closer to 50, or 20?

With the immeasurable level of technology that they had in Wall-E (remember that they built multiple self-sustaining space-stations to survive for hundreds of years light-years away from our planet), they didn't seem as interested to use some of that technology to keep Earth's plants and vegetation from completely dying out, and subsequently depriving the planet of oxygen, that thing we need to breathe and live.  Was one more cost-effective than the other?

A Scene from the Film Wall-E

In our present state of technological prowess, we've built machines that take care of half our worldly needs; Vehicles that can traverse through water and space, man-made islands composed of 5 star hotels bigger than towns I've lived in, a complex digital communications network that can keep us from ever having to talk to someone in person, and a tiny little robot that can clean and vacuum your floors for without ever needing a hint of human assistance...yet we use prison laborers to clean the side of our highways

We made life so easy for ourselves but our efforts are in vein. I can have a pizza delivered directly to my house, paid and with gratuity included with ONE push of a button on my phone, yet it took me 3 days to find a place I could buy one of those grabby things you see people using to pick up garbage after concerts and sporting events.  If you find reaching into your pocket too arduous a task, you can always pick up one of those nifty little Apple watches to assist in your online consumerism.

Soon, we will be slaves to our lethargy. People used to be amazed by any kind of technological advance mankind came up with (can you imagine the party they threw for the guy who made the wheel?), now I could show somebody a robot performing brain surgery and they'd probably shrug like I just showed them an old boot laying in the sidewalk. Our obsession with our own personal comforts only serves as a way to keep us weak and unprepared should some catastrophic event should occur and our countries infrastructures go to shit. What will you do when the lights turn off? When you're phone goes out of service? When the only fresh water you can get is collected in coffee cups looming under gray clouds dumping acid rain on your city? We have no idea what kind of indescribable hardships will occur if we, as a civilization, fall apart.

I can tell you one thing though, there won't be some mega-utopian-spacecraft to whisk us away into the quiet vacuum of space. Not in our lifetime anyways. So in the meantime, why not catch up on a little literature that could be somewhat beneficial in case civilization crumbles.

For us desert folk, we have Desert Emergency Survival Basics, or for when shit really hits the fan there's The Worst-Case Scenario Handbook.  Remember those, they'll be great for camping and post-apocalyptic catastrophes. Don't say I didn't warn ya!

Sweet Dreams :)