Hope is Complex and Fragile

I told someone that I will weep with joy when industrial civilization crashes. They said they might weep when industrial civilization crashes because "it's not going to be fun at all."

Yes, it's not going to be "fun" to get weaned off of our addictions. It's not going to be "fun" to stop poisoning our landbases and killing 200 species to extinction every day. It's not going to be "fun" to stop poisoning ourselves through our food and water supply. It's not going to be "fun" to start living within our means. It's not going to be "fun" to stop raping the land. 

​This kind of thinking is poison.

People seem obsessed with perpetuating the machine/system that brought us to this low point. To this place where we are killing off 200 species a day, where we are changing our climate for the worse, where we are adding 5 billion people in the last 100 years. This way of life is horrific, unequal, and killing us all. Yet they want to perpetuate it.

Industrial civilization must fall. Will fall, one way or another. Delusions about continuing it any longer are poison.

​There is an ever-accelerating trend of rendering the planet inhospitable. These trends are so firmly entrenched that there is seemingly no way to cease doing them; we as individuals have only the two options: one of inefficient protest that routinely changes nothing, or to sit back with some popcorn to watch the inevitable decline. 

Even if one were to convince the masses that action was necessary, that in order to halt our species' suicide we must put to death the men and women who perpetuate these systems that are destroying us, would genocide be the answer to this ecocide? Wouldn't other "well-meaning" people just take their place? Would the workers not want to be paid? 

We are left with sabotage or popcorn. Do, or watch. But someone needs to shut the switch. Push the button. Because hope is a fragile thing. We need to open up our future to a possibility of healing, where survivors can build anew. 

I worry that I'm not prepared enough. I worry about my wife. I worry about my friends and those I love. And I wonder which one is worse: industrial civilization collapsing tomorrow, or industrial civilization continuing on unabated.