The Flood is Coming! The Flood is Coming!
The benefit of a ‘slow motion train wreck’ is to allow the observer to understand what is going to happen before it does; a train wreck. Now, if one is in the immediate vicinity of such a wreck, and it happens in slow motion, then one has time to understand and react and get out of the way of the imminent catastrophe, and its radiant sphere of collateral damage. Or, one might become paralyzed by the spectacle; to see if what you expect to happen actually does happen even though you know it’s probably going to happen — and by then it’s too late.
Did anyone else start building a boat because Noah was building one, or did they all scoff at the alarmist, reactionary who followed a voice in his head that warned about a hard rain coming? When the deluge came to sweep away all that was before, were there no other vessels bobbing up and down on the waves in search of safe harbor? Of course there were.
The train wreck we witness today — the fall of the United States from the fountain of imperial hubris to the puddle of a failed, lawless, bankrupt state devolved to dog-eat-dog tribalism — has been a long time coming. Perhaps it all began with the hit-job on JFK, or further back with the coup against Iran, or dropping the A-bomb on Japan, or giving over the public treasury to private banks, or not addressing the issue of slavery in the constitution, or not being exactly honest about which men were created equal and which men weren’t, including half the human race of females. It can be argued that America lost its soul somewhere along the line, or indeed that it never had a soul being a nation founded upon the rights of private property over universal suffrage, but it is hard to argue that the soul of the American nation, if it ever existed, exists today.
And what is that soul? Nothing less than the human aspiration to achieve the human ideal; happiness; the fruit of survival.
How far away does humanity dwell from its ideal? It is difficult to pursue happiness when survival itself is the daily bread; from ‘food-challenged’ to ‘paycheck-to-paycheck’. The wealthy appear happy because of material comforts and want us all to keep up with their Joneses and be happy too. But the body is not the soul, as the spirit of a nation is not the land. When six out of seven billion people are starving, enslaved or slave-waged, those who claim happiness live in ignorance of the connection between all life on this planet. The global balance between happiness and want is no balance at all. We see over generations and centuries how the human disease of greed runs the world and how the accumulation, concentration and centralization of this greed known as the Money Power has produced an ‘unsustainable’ civilization that threatens to break apart under the weight of its false original premise; greed is good.
So, if we watch this slow motion train wreck of an unsustainable ‘world’ as it desperately struggles to status-quo itself against the laws of nature, not to mention decency, don’t we have a ‘flood’ moment to decide whether to build a boat or gawk?
Preppers have been prepping forever. Most of us have thought of them as paranoid alarmists. Scoffed at them as the tale says Noah was humiliated. But what is that saying about having the last laugh? He who laughs least laughs last? Happiness is the fruit of survival.
Noah had his God. We have our wits. And a choice — watch in horror or start paddling.
