There is no need to be informed. I am
no longer curious. I do not consume The News on TV, radio,
newspaper, nor my Facebook newsfeed. I have well-informed,
intelligent, politically-aware friends on Facebook who post what
would be some interesting perspectives on world events if I had any
interest in exposing myself to that anymore. I am happy to learn if
my friends have had a baby or a moment of inspiration, but I simply
need not follow the link of posts about radiation pouring into the
ocean, war here, there and everywhere, political corruption or
violence on small or mass scales. More of this type of information
would add nothing to my life.
I used to smoke a lot of marijuana and
it used to be inspiring and exciting and social. Now I do not smoke
marijuana, because when I do it simply provokes paranoia and is
depressing and anti-social. I figure that I smoked too much, hit my
threshold and now it will no longer work. I do not regret my time
with marijuana, it changed me forever, opened my mind to new modes of
perception and was ultimately a positive experience, albeit one that
I no longer need to repeat, neither enjoying it nor getting anything
out of it.
Similarly, I am glad that I have
pursued the knowledge of current events to the extent that I have in
my life, critically out of any form of mainstream media. The
internet, independent documentaries, word-of-mouth, travelling, and
especially hitchhiking and therefore speaking to a wide and diverse
section of the population, have exposed me to many new perspectives
on the world, undermining the belief systems I was taught to not
consider alternatives to, taught by television, schooling and an
ambient cultural haze. My exposure to critical current events
stories have repeatedly transformed me, shocked and inspired me. The
perverse facade of culture has been torn off and I would certainly
feel exposed and vulnerable if it did not leave me with an entire
multi-dimensional universe populated by loving and beautiful entities
who I encounter daily. It is certainly habitual to continue to
pursue this culturally-critical media, like it can become habitual to
suck on a pipe of marijuana every day. It will eventually fail to
serve a purpose.
How much more informed can a person be
about current events? While people quibble over details, whether
global warming is worse than the acidification of the ocean, whether
we should not vote at all or at least vote for the least worst party,
the trend is rather clear. Industrial Civilisation must come down.
There is no other alternative and if you do not agree then perhaps
you have not exposed yourself to enough hours of diverse independent
current events. The Global Economy must collapse if any positive
change is going to occur on any large scale. National governments
must fall or be brought down if any type of community organisation is
going to occur on any reasonable scale. Simply, when the impediments
to making positive changes are removed, we can begin to rebuild a
healthy and stable human world.
This is the bad news and the big news.
Now, I suppose, it is time for me to focus on the good news, the
positive, what is going to rebuild and strengthen what is valuable in
this world. This is not an act of denial for me. The spread of what
we now call Western Civilisation around the world over the last few
thousand years via war and genocide has resulted in the destruction
of countless human cultures, extinction of countless species and
degradation of so much of our planet. Put simply, nothing justifies
that, not even stupormarkets. This will always be in the back of my
mind, until I find something larger and more significant, a wider
perspective, that will render my person even more equipped to
contribute to a positively changing world. I cannot forget. It is,
for some reason, not a choice for me. It is not an aspect of my
character. So I choose now to place that necessary negativity aside,
in my past as it is so undeniably in the past of my culture, leading
us inevitably to the present.
The best thing about the present
leading into the future is that it is yet undetermined. It will be
the decisions of all of us that will determine the future. To create
a positive change it is necessary to focus on the creative, not
simply the destructive. So now, having reached the reasonable
conclusion that massive cultural rebirthing needs to occur before
humans can live in healthy relationship with our environment, there
is the next step of exploring the beautifully exciting and inspiring
possible futures that we each contribute to creating around us.
It might still be necessary for my
hitchhiking experiences to focus on the negative, because so many of
the people I meet in this way are so relieved to be able to talk to
somebody honestly about the global cultural crisis manifest as
Industrial Economy. They hesitate to mention to the people in their
life that they hope the Global Economy collapses, cos they think they
are the only one who feels this way. They don't often get the
opportunity to really discuss these things, to air their opinions, to
even hear their own voice speaking what they have been thinking for
years, to be able to judge their own thoughts in the presence of
another intelligent critically-thinking human being. Of course these
people have deliberately embedded themselves in the media machine,
the same media machine that so many of the people in their lives are
also embedded in, so they all repeat the same garbage fed to them by
their own decisions. So they think that they are the only one who
questions it, they think all their friends and family are stupid and
love all that consumerism and hierarchy, never daring to bring the
subject up; except with a random hitchhiker.
Having taken these steps over and over
again, it is now necessary for me to take the next steps, to
re-imagine the world I would like to live in and then make decisions
in life that reflect that. I can no longer expose myself to
marijuana. Taking gluten and dairy out of my diet have unambiguously
alerted me to the extremely detrimental effect they have on my body.
Corporate media is equally indigestible by the human body. I cannot
look back now. There is no room in my life for toxic exposure to
television, and now it is also necessary to cut back progressively
and perhaps permanently, on media that makes me feel angry,
powerless, hopeless, apathetic and paranoid. In light of my loss of
cultural innocence, a bright and inspiring New is necessary to search
for amongst the soil and plastic I find myself amongst.
It is widely acknowledged that
positivity is often completely inane. It is so widespread for great
art to be extremely negative and destructive that some people claim
that an artist must suffer great pain and produce work only from this
place for it to be worthwhile. I guess this assumes the alternative
is denial. It has certainly been necessary to develop this rich and
complex language for talking about our cultural problems, to express
them through cathartic art and to understand them through scathing
analysis. It is surely necessary now to develop a language to
express, understand and manifest a great future without inanity and
denial. A language to talk about the positive and creative
developments in the world. To create art and debate around a
positive future, of hope, love and life, without the dichotomy of
cynicism or denial that we have accepted in the past.