Does anyone else feel the whole world is imploding right now

I mean we have a nuclear meltdown going on in Japan, civil war in Bahrain and Libya, not to mention any number of other uprisings in the Middle East, and then we here in the U.S. are being systematically stripped of our civil rights.

Maybe the Mayan calendar guys are right after all or is this just globalization coming to fruition?

Cheer up, there actually a bright side. The Fascists among us are trying to restore feudal serfdom which was destroyed by the Plague.

We are going to lose so many people around the world that cheap labor will be a faint, fond memory of the seriously less-rich-than-they-used-to-be.

The less bright side is we probably won't live to see it.

That could be the more bright side. :toast:

I have long been a hardcore news junkie but lately it's just been depressing me

I really should have gone the ignorance is bliss route. :nopity:

I suspect globalization is coming to a stop here.

But that is the interesting thing here, on the one hand what is going on is very frighting. But from a historical perspective, and I have been a student of history for over 30 years now, this is extremely fascinating. These are incredibly historical times we are living in that will be talked about and studied for years and years to come.

But like with all major realignments in history they usually have massive conflicts associated with them.

I am doing history of labor and except this week, I have been bloging, not studying, labor in the midwest (And collecting primary sources)

and some history I came across some years back was talking about Jimmy Hoffa did a lot of organizing in Indianapolis. So I guess us Hoosiers did have a part to play in the labor movement. But of course now we are having a part to play in tearing it down.

Oh well, that's the way it goes sometimes.

it is truly awe inspiring

They will win the battle but hardly the war. The workers have woken up in ways many of us thought WHEN.

He has been able to get peoples attention and take a look at what is going on that 30 years of pleading has failed to do.

And probably a whole lot of other languages.

I feel what you are feeling. And I can't sleep, either.

There is no reason *we*, the human race, can't change direction. Every sign is telling us we are headed over the cliff, headed the wrong way. Why can't we say *stop*!!! We needn't go fat backwards. But we can stop and think, do the right things for the majority of people.

Only the profiteers are preventing US from doing right things for the most people. Most people want to work for fair wages. most people want to live productive lives.

But there are a few who want to win all the money, have all the power, at the expense of the majority. There are those who think wars are how they make big bucks.

As for sleep I am just in a nocturnal phase right now but it has more to do with I can't get certain medications I need because I don't have any health insurance. But that's a whole other thread. :crazy:

is wondering what the outcome will be (assuming we don't just collapse entirely).

I see more and more authoritarian measures being taken here in America. If a huge crisis hits us directly, I think all kinds of rightwing cretins like Scott Walker will slither out from under their fat corporate bosses' asses and impose martial law. They're already taking steps toward that with these measures Governors are trying to cram down our throats.

The trouble with a coup is the requirement of support. And if you give yourself the privilege of seizing power, you really can't yell "Foul!" if someone turns around and seizes it from you. Well, you can, but they won't listen as they are tying your legs and arms to four different vehicles.

perhaps not looking like it could be of much use in case of emergency. I wish I was amongst the blissfully unaware, at this point.

It looks bad right now and yes, there is a lot of horrible stuff going on, but it's not the end of the world. I don't think it is anyhow. I could be wrong.

In any case, if spring has sprung near you, seriously, go look at some critters that are just waking up from their sleep, butterflies or something. Don't let it get to you so much that you start to get depressed too much by it. Life's too short. Try to enjoy any good you can find in it now, because later, who knows? We might not even have the butterflies any more.

Shit, on second thought. Would you mind scooting over? I need room on that therapist's couch too. You are right. It's freaking hideous right now. :scared:

I am of the believe that "Man has been predicting the end of times since the beginning of time and to date he has been 100% incorrect." No, these are just times of change however, they are massive changes.

A native prophesy.

http://www.youtube.com/v/lVSmLpNK45Q

Enjoyed the video!

I'm going to bookmark that one. It was great.

It's up there with 9/11, maybe worse. Things just seem to be developing in slow motion, so it's less of a shock.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4772951

Humor aside, I'm perched between at 937 & 917

There comes a point where the powers-that-be no longer have the money or the equipment to deal with earthquakes, floods, blizzards and hurricanes. I read a recent article that called this condition "Disaster Fatigue".

We are already seeing a gigantic rise in food prices because of floods in Australia and freezes in Mexico this winter.

Our military is strung out all over the globe fighting useless (expensive) wars while our factories at home are shut down. We no longer have the ability to re-tool and rebuild.. because all our jobs (and resources) have been sent to CHINA.

We have a complacent, muzzled media.. lack of leadership in the White House and a Congress so infested with lobbyists and criminals that they make bedbugs look friendly.

It doesn't look good. We are one earthquake in California or one major hurricane in the Gulf away from the ability to deal with these disasters.
-----------------------------

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24712998/ns/us_news-giving/

(snip) Charities know this as "donor fatigue," but it might be more accurately described as disaster fatigue — the sense that these events are never-ending, uncontrollable and overwhelming.

Lib2daBone you're right. many of us have been angered by this for the past 10 years.

SoCal Dem, this is NOTHING like October 1962.I was awake and paying attention back then.

Back then 'we' hadn't poisoned our oceans and outsourced jobs. The economy was only 10 times better. People could make decent livings. There was REAL HOPE before JFK, MLK, and RFK were taken out by assassination.

no more

lack of leadership in the White House and a Congress so infested with lobbyists and criminals that they make bedbugs look friendly.


Bang on.

:scared:

As did Nov of 63.

:cry:

. . . but, for now, I'll remain (**uh**) blissfully ignorant on the subject. Here's the link, however . . . just in case you ever feel as though you need to feel even more of the feeling that "the whole world is imploding" --->

http://www.pssurvival.com

:eyes:


Edited to add: Outside my bedroom window, tulips begin to peek out of the ground and reach for the sky.

It's so easy, particularly for media hounds and news junkies who spend a great deal of time in front of a screen, to become overwhelmed with things that are not actually "real" relative to their own lives. Yes we're all connected, but we're also individuals.

I had an elderly neighbor who was not physically very mobile due to various ailments, and so he spent a great deal of time in front of the television. Before he was so housebound he had been a gregarious person, outgoing, generous of spirit and never considered anyone a stranger. It was heartbreaking to see the changes in him as his reality seemed to be more and more influenced by what crossed his television screen. He was full of fear about possibly being robbed or worse, felt more vulnerable overall. He started locking up his home, put bars on the windows, rarely went out to feed the birds and watch wildlife from his porch as he once had enjoyed so much. He installed one of those bright nightime security lamps in his yard, etc. When I asked him how he was doing he would simply repeat the frightening news of the day, advising me and others to be more cautious. And this is the danger when we give our reality over to the media. I don't think he smiled in the whole last year of his life. I think his joyless, fearful life was worse than any of the things he feared. At the least it was a sad waste of a beautiful life.

Yes, big changes are sweeping the planet but it's not all happening in our backyard. The birds still sing, the plants still blossom, the sun still rises. Just open your door and step outside...breathe.

Things are what they are, and while we are individuals we are still all interconnected. You might say I subscribe to the butterfly effect. And I have done this for enough decades that I know when it is time to go look at some clouds.

which is why it's critical that we as individuals are in balance and alignment with ourselves and others and with the natural world as best we can be. What are we sending out - fear, love, beauty, horror, empathy, anger, etc.? It matters. If the media is permitted to usurp our authentic reality then we just become like one more transmitter of that media reality.

I think he may have been onto something with "the quickening," if only a decade too early.

People never really came out and said it, but in my time I've seen how a major crisis changed the political winds. Back in the late 70s and 80s we had the AIDS crisis. As much as I agree that Ronald Reagan did not do enough to stop and contain the spread of the virus, the gay community did not do itself any favors, either. One only needs to read, "And the Band Played On," to learn about their reluctance to close the bathhouses, refusing to change behavior that was spreading the disease. I see that moment in history as the beginning of the end for the Liberal Party. It was at this time that I became a social pragmatist, understanding that no one can override their own mortality and any political party that supports decisions that will eventually affect the public, safety and health of a community provides the means for its own demise.

As AIDS was the Liberal's bell toll, the conservatives have had more than a few of their own. The War on Iraq, the failed oil platform in the Gulf and now the nuclear reactors. These are major lapses on the part of conservative thinking which has pushed for these responses to resolve our energy problem even though they knew that we were walking a very thin line. The fact that the people who made these decisions were more driven by profits than safety, will ultimately be the end of the conservative thinking that relies more and more on acts of faith from the public, rather than science.

But we have to frame the situation to make sure people understand that it's their desire for profit which is behind the bullying and other tactics they use to continue to push bad ideas and continually put us in danger. Let me remind you of one of the tactics the Bush Administration used, destroying scientific reports that didn't support their position. And if they didn't destroy them, they edited them to remove anything that would challenge them.

Now, how much of these ticking time bombs are we going to see go off before everyone wises up and puts the blame where it belongs? We do have a large core of people in the U.S.A. who think it's their divine right to do whatever they damn well please and hate anything that will regulate their behavior. They even have gone so far as to hamstring civil remedies which allows them to make reckless decisions without fear of reprisals. Unless we can connect the dots for the mainstream to show them the cause and effect of conservative thinking, we doom the human race into an early demise.

It's the truth. Stuff like this goes on all the time, and it always has. The only difference is that now, we have 24 hour news channels and the Internet to hype and fear-monger. Could you imagine what the world would be like during the Black Death if we had the current MSM and Internet? Or, the Civil War or either of the World Wars? The Anchorage earthquake of 1964 was stronger than the one in Japan. Had the population been as dense as it is in Japan, there would have been as many deaths there from the quake and the subsequent tsunamis. That all happened just a few months after President Kennedy was assassinated. Shit happens, and life goes on. We never had an "Armageddon" mentality over multiple disasters until the corporatists took over our media and told us that we should be afraid.

But now we're seeing how we compound these disasters. Poor reasoning, magnified x 1000.

There are certainly a series of acute crises, and a number of ongoing crises. There always are.