I can't be there. I remember all the Marches of the sixties and seventies I was at. My spirit will be there. As I approach the end of my time here I am more and more concerned about what we are leaving behind for future generations. I may be naive, but I believe that the world will change tomorrow. Awareness is irreversible. Once you know you can not go back.
We are in big trouble and the forces of greed and oligarchy want to keep us marching to our destruction. Capitalism is unsustainable, inequality has to be reversed, and we need to change the way we live.
Read on below and I'll say a bit more.
The momentum is clearly growing. The climate has changed and it looks like North America is experiencing the arctic again as the vortex and jet stream destabilize more. The arctic warms and we freeze. Ironic.
This is the most clear global issue I have experienced in my 78 years. My own awareness began early and I never thought we would reach this point. When I came back from my post doctoral training in Israel in 1965 I was an expert in the new non-equilibrium thermodynamics. My new boss, Fred Snell, was quick to see that we could use it to model weather in ways never possible before. My interest at the time was membrane biophysics, and I wished him well.
My evolution as a scientist kept me aware of the global warming damage we were doing and also my political bent made it clear that capitalism was a greed driven system that did a number of things. Marshal Mcluhan's The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man was a prophecy all too clear.
The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1st Ed.: The Vanguard Press, NY, 1951) is a pioneering study of popular culture by Herbert Marshall McLuhan, treating newspapers, comics, and advertisements as poetic texts.
Like his later 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, The Mechanical Bride is unique and composed of a number of short essays that can be read in any order – what he styled the "mosaic approach" to writing a book. Each essay begins with a newspaper or magazine article or an advertisement, followed by McLuhan's analysis thereof. The analyses bear on aesthetic considerations as well as on the implications behind the imagery and text. McLuhan chose the ads and articles included in his book not only to draw attention to their symbolism and their implications for the corporate entities that created and disseminated them, but also to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed.
McLuhan is concerned by the size and the intentions of the North American culture industry. "Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind," McLuhan writes in his preface to the book. He believes everyone is kept in a "helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of many ads and much entertainment alike."[3] McLuhan hopes Bride can reverse this process.
By using artifacts of popular culture as a means to enlighten the public, McLuhan hopes the public can consciously observe the effects of popular culture on them.
McLuhan compares his method to the sailor in Edgar Allan Poe's short-story "A Descent into the Maelstrom." The sailor, McLuhan writes, saves himself by studying the whirlpool and by co-operating with it. Likewise, the book is not interested in attacking the strong currents of advertising, radio, and the press.
The book argues anger and outrage are not the proper responses to the culture industry. "The time for anger...is in the early stages of a new process," McLuhan says, "the present stage is extremely advanced." Amusement is the proper strategy. This is why McLuhan uses punning questions that border on silly or absurd after each visual example.
On the technique of amusement McLuhan quotes Poe's sailor, when he's locked into the whirlpool's walls looking at floating objects:
"I must have been delirious, for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents towards the foam below." This amusement, McLuhan argues, born "of his rational detachment as a spectator of his own situation," saved the sailor's life. By adopting the position of Poe's sailor, readers of Bride can escape from the whirlpool of popular culture.
Well not only did we not escape, but we became enslaved. The result is what we will change tomorrow.
My concerns and my learning progressed to the point where, with the help of Jim coffman, it could be put together in a coherent story of how we got here:Global Insanity: How Homo sapiens Lost Touch with Reality while Transforming the World
The Global Economy that sustains the civilized world is destroying the biosphere. As a result, civilization, like the Titanic, is on a collision course with disaster. But changing course via the body politic appears to be well nigh impossible, given that much of the populace lives in denial. Why is that? And how did we get into such a fix? In this essay, biologists James Coffman and Donald Mikulecky argue that the reductionist model of the world developed by Western civilization misrepresents life, undermining our ability to regulate and adapt to the accelerating anthropogenic transformation of the world entrained by that very model. An alternative worldview is presented that better accounts for both the relational nature of living systems and the developmental phenomenology that constrains their evolution. Development of any complex system reinforces specific dependencies while eliminating alternatives, reducing the diversity that affords adaptive degrees of freedom: the more developed a system is, the less potential it has to change its way of being. Hence, in the evolution of life most species become extinct. This perspective reveals the limits that complexity places on knowledge and technology, bringing to light our hubristically dysfunctional relationship with the natural world and increasingly tenuous connection to reality. The inescapable conclusion is that, barring a cultural metamorphosis that breaks free of deeply entrenched mental frames that made us what we are, continued development of the Global Economy will lead inexorably to the collapse of civilization.
I will not be there physically tomorrow. Clearly my spirit will.