There\u2019s been a lot of talk lately about the death of things, what ideas and conditions, corporations and institutions have lost all hope of surviving, have somehow been so weakened by greedy attrition or cumulative neglect that they cannot be lifted up by even those that truly wish and will them to continue.\u00a0 Old people are always talking about these things, about what ain\u2019t there no more, but they speak of things being corrupted, abandoned, or traded.\u00a0 Bitterness stimulated by a lessening of purchasing power or energy.\u00a0 That\u2019s never been enough, though, to bring us all down.\u00a0 What\u2019s compounded their negativity in the great congress of What\u2019s Going On is that we have hit upon one of those historical cycles where the young are offering their own analysis of a world that, if all are to believed, is drowning in its own offal.\u00a0 They don\u2019t need any long-range view to confirm their wisdom or even a small quorum of facts before they agree with each other.\u00a0 They just need to be loud.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
I blame the media, of course.\u00a0 Not that they intended (or could even be trusted to intend anything so grand in scope) to sour the subconscious of two whole generations.\u00a0 Though they continue to caress the minds of the majority, stories with happy endings, on TV, in movies, in songs, even in our myriad methods of \u201cdocumentation\u201d are, at best, merely dismissed by even those who love them as unnecessary yet amusing and, at worst, flogged and abused by intellectuals for being vapid wastes of human energy.\u00a0 Unworthy of conscious viewing much less admiration.\u00a0 I\u2019m not strictly speaking of the sentimental or gaudy\u2026even the sad sacrifice of a few heroes balances finite worlds in a way we can all accept and put aside before bedtime.\u00a0 But the things that stick in our minds, the stories that impress cerebral culture vultures and deeply disturb the casual consumer are the ones that hold up life as an inscrutable game, one where the losers lose horribly and graphically in emotional upsets and the winners arrive at their end more by coincidence or a scrap of luck than anything else.\u00a0 There are still morals, still satisfying reversals of fortune, but these resolutions are suspended in gravity, not sources of it.<\/p>\n
So you grow up licking butter off your fingers, entranced and educated by all these stories of violence, cruel tricks of fortune, or even the especially popular trope of \u201cany stranger can drastically impact your life if the mouse trap is set correctly\u201d that blossomed in the early nineties and were eventually celebrated with awards in this current decade, a long silver thread winding from Last Night<\/em> to Crash<\/em>.\u00a0 And the equation has come to find as its solution the meta idea that human civilization is about to reach its limit.\u00a0 That we have somehow, through a mix of intuition and diligence outsmarted the world and overachieved, then replaced all our foundations with conveniences light as matchsticks, a framework that will either snap under the weight or just strike the right honest surface and set fire to us all.\u00a0 We have embraced the idea that our fragility is evolving faster than our passion.<\/p>\n So here it comes, the unsustainable weight of human creation caving in on itself. \u00a0There it goes, all our capital: newspapers, democracy, family trust, patriotism, true literature, the dollar, on and on.\u00a0 All it took was a small financial crisis to cue the Great Awakening 2.0, the telepathic realization that what we took for vibrant establishments were merely sarcophagi, testaments of a past glory preserved for an afterlife that does not exist.<\/p>\n Bullshit.<\/p>\n First of all, this is an extremely ethnocentric view to take, by which I mean Americans have always been the first to confuse their country with the world and whatever plague hangs over their camp must be affecting the rest of humanity as well.\u00a0 A kind of reverse empathy.\u00a0 Unfortunately for the screaming heads, this isn\u2019t so.<\/p>\n Granted, things are looking dire, if you consider an inevitable forced reckoning that leaves behind few of the comfortable forms and protocols we\u2019ve grown accustomed to \u201cdire.\u201d\u00a0 There have always been an uncategorized sect of people who believe that it is our species\u2019 destiny to destroy the world, or at least ourselves.\u00a0 The defenders of this position have been with us ever since our brains divided into right and left hemispheres, people so overwhelmed by the enormity of human potential that they can\u2019t believe we can keep our self-destructive tendencies confined to small outbursts.\u00a0 In times before ours these types worried about rampant vice or political tyranny\u2014not in the way we see them today, but as weapons as equally as catastrophic as the atomic bomb.\u00a0 And even now that we\u2019ve had the bomb for over half a century and its dangers have become slightly antiquated, they\u2019ve had to shake their fists in other directions.\u00a0 Acid rain, the ozone layer, global warming, poverty and hunger spreading like a rampant virus, resisting any cure.\u00a0 These are issues that need to be addressed, but none of them will kill us overnight and none of them are strong enough to kill us all.<\/p>\n So it becomes necessary for the less paranoid among us to remind the others that human misery is not the only measuring stick: it just always seems closer at hand.<\/p>\n But no matter how many companies fall, how devalued a currency becomes, or how much negligence gets brought to light, this is not the end.\u00a0 The end never comes.\u00a0 The end never begins.\u00a0 The end is merely inherent in us all, shot through our cells like rays of benign radiation, the awareness of our own inevitable deaths extrapolated, almost comically, to the cessation of all human history.<\/p>\n Can\u2019t you just calm down a little?\u00a0 Can\u2019t you rest a little easier knowing that even if you lose your job tomorrow you\u2019ll still have your future, and that time is so forgiving in the long run?\u00a0 Or even if you lose your life tomorrow, you leave behind six billion of us to continue to fight the Big Darkness?<\/p>\n Even if there are no newspapers, there will still be facts.\u00a0 Even if there are no Big Three, there will still be invention.\u00a0 Even if the market breaks, we will still need trade. \u00a0All that is falling apart are the outdated instruments of delivery and description.\u00a0 But even if it all fails and somehow eradicates this clap-trap modern world we\u2019ve put together, humans will still exist and still tell stories and still evade meaninglessness through endeavor.\u00a0 Our adaptability has gotten us this far.\u00a0 Our inheritance comes from the first men to strive for more than day to day sustenance.\u00a0 When our prey moved too fast for us to catch and eat it, we developed endurance.\u00a0 We learned to outpace the animal.\u00a0 Pursue it until it collapsed or got cornered, then tear it apart into portable pieces.\u00a0 You think that little instinct isn\u2019t still within us all?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s been a lot of talk lately about the death of things, what ideas and conditions, corporations and institutions have lost all hope of surviving, have somehow been so weakened by greedy attrition or cumulative neglect that they cannot be …<\/p>\n