My darling George uses a certain word to encompass a plethora of meanings. One of these such words is ‘crap’. This one little word is used in many ways… and interesting enough his male friends understand exactly what he means in what ever sentence he uses it… and vice versa.
“Did you see that crap?”
“That was a bunch of crap!”
“Oh, don’t give me that crap.”
“Hand me that crap.”
“Hey, what was that crap he said?” …and it goes on and on.
I then happen to be on the net surfing and ran into a post by Kelly Coyne entitled: Year after The Age of Limits: 5 Responses to the End Times (which I believe she should re-title it: The Crappening)
She and her husband Erik Knutzen, are authors of The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City (2008) and Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World (2011).
In this blog post Kelly goes on to express her experience at a workshop and her opinion of our future… the excerpts I posted were worth sharing as it seemed to resonate some truth for me:
Nonetheless, I believe the US is in a slow downhill slide. Our empire is overstretching its resource base. Climate change is complicating matters further, and its impact will be deepen in years to come. Witness our burned out cities, the storm damage which is never repaired, the jobs which are never replaced, our failing infrastructure and social programs and our ineffectual political system which seems incapable of addressing any of these issues.
My own personal take on this state of affairs is that we will not bounce back with a miraculous recovery. Instead, things will stagger on, our standards will slip, and we’ll forget what we once had and accept the sinking status quo as a given. This is what I call The Crappening. Which is not to be confused with a Happening, which would be more fun.
The Crappening is not the same as collapse. The Crappening simply means that times are crappy and will slowly get crappier still, in a long term descending trajectory of crap. I liken the experience to being unable to leave the miserable town you grew up in for a better place, because there are no better places to go.
There’s no big show to look forward to, in other words. If you are waiting for the apocalypse, look around. This is it.
The Crappening is not a time for valiant last stands. It’s about making due, being sensible and lending a hand to those in need.
If the Crappening has a spirit animal, it would be a little burro with a heavy load on its back. The burro doesn’t think the world is ending because it has to carry a heavy load. It just keeps walking, because that is what you do.
There are no answers, only action.
Clear thinking people can see trouble all around us and more on the horizon, and it’s natural to want answers. What should we do? How can we make it better?
I’ve come to the conclusion that there are no answers. It would be nice to know that someone smarter than ourselves has figured this all of out so we don’t have to. I know that’s how I feel: Where are the grownups?
All I can say to myself and anyone who wants to listen to me is:
1) don’t panic and
2) get busy
Any change or positive action to come about in the coming years will come from the ground level, person by person, house by house, community by community. …
Action will keep us sane, help us day to day, and at the same time, it is the only thing likely to help the big picture.
It’s a bit Zen. The point of action is not that it will save us, it’s in the action itself. It’s the process, not the outcome. It’s the practice, not the theory. It’s about the kind of life you build, and how you feel in your skin living that life.
What does “get busy” mean?
• Disconnect from materialist culture. Get out of debt. Downsize. Simplify. Be ready for the worst, but don’t fear it.
• If you want to engage with politics, do so on a local level. Fight for walkable, bikeable cities and locally grown food via farmers markets, community gardens, etc.
• Learn skills. Basic carpentry, plumbing, electronic repair, gardening, animal husbandry, sewing/knitting/weaving, home cooking, food preservation, simple medicine, brewing, baking… You don’t have to do all these thing, only some of them. Or just one of them, if you can do it really, really well. Teach what you know to others. Raise kids who know these things.
• Get fit. Eat right. It’s important to stay healthy and mobile…, so you can walk, bike or take the bus to work (by choice, or if you lose your car), so you can haul manure in your garden, so you can avoid expensive medical care, so you can help others.
• Become attuned to the cycles of life and death, decay and renewal. Keep a compost pile, a worm bin. They’re useful systems, and they teach you a lot about life.
• If you don’t have a faith or a philosophy to follow, consider finding some conceptual framework to hang your reality upon. It helps.
• Let creativity flourish. Learn to play instrument, tell a story, work clay or whittle toys from wood.
There have always been hard times. And there has always been laughter and beauty and love in the midst of those hard times. Look to those things. Ignore the apocalypse.
