The times they are a-changin’

Submitted by Lindsay
Melbourne Australia!

If you want a picture of the future,
imagine a boot stamping on the human face. - George Orwell, 1984

(8/2018) President Donald Trump is a sign of the times. A whirlwind that has been brewing for the last 100 years has now reached the shores of every country on earth. It doesn’t matter where you are hiding, It is going to blow you away, into a new world, a new way of thinking and existing.

Along with you, I have been wondering what the fact of his ascendancy could possibly mean. It is not the old, usual things, not the things one could expect a world leader to be or to bring, but one who has arrived almost as a force of nature. There is no other explanation, because no one before him would even imagine such behaviour, such rampaging through the world of protocol and decency.

He has replaced the old ways with a cataclysm of disorder, taken the established system and shaken it till its eyes pop out. We have stood by, mouths agape, waiting for the wheat to fly out of this obvious straw man, waiting for the old guard to simply tear him to pieces so things could return to normal. But it didn’t and hasn’t happened, and it won’t - because the changes have already destroyed the picture we were comfortable with.

Welcome to the new world.

Yes, he was elected by the people, without a majority, without any sense of the new reality that was emerging, and it was almost as thought forces outside anyone’s understanding were at work. Maybe the world was taking matters into its own hands, rebelling at the ways in which we had treated it. That it wasn’t doesn’t matter – the degradation of democracy and the calumny of capitalism had it well in hand - but whatever, he is there and we have to get used to it.

That, of course, is not all we have to get used to. He is the harbinger of a new order in which we will look back at this time and wish it would return. Because the planet is going to keep seeking vengeance. It’s biggest stick is climate change, when food of all kinds will become scarcer, land mass smaller, water levels and temperatures higher. It’s pollution will ramp up death and disease, ozone reduction will cancer the skin, and traditional farming will be gone.

Before that, the outcome of our desires for more and more will make their presence felt. Automated jobs, much smaller work forces and the gig economy are leading to severely reduced tax bases; robotics are taking over much of the lower paid work, block chains are corralling money with the rich still getting richer and the poor poorer. Pills and pastimes are no substitute for meaning and creativity, and combined with religious superstition, whose adherents hide from and excuse the real world, any hope of getting action in slowing the outcome is forlorn.

That’s the social bit. There’s also the unknown but looming impact of China, Russia, Europe, and probably the rest of the world. His drive to alienate friends and embrace enemies may not be the sign of madness as we think, but an unconscious desire to do the planet’s bidding. We will find out soon enough, as the wracks of a new Chinese inquisition stretch our faith and our beliefs.

Then there’s world affairs. He’s cosying up to Putin, slapping tariffs on everything like a spoilt child with crayons and blank walls, treating anyone who thought they were friends with spite and dissing congress as though they were no more than a bunch of jerks. The tariff thing is going to catalyse the demise of production and trade turning them into wastelands. He seems unaware of the real reasons for your loss of productivity and jobs, which is so simple – when world trade is sequestered by a very few corporations, higher cost local production gets a boot in the face. Production goes off shore, someone like China becomes the source of much of your household items, they finish up buying your debt and there’s a smile on the face of the tiger.

The importance he is giving to ramping up armament production at home and abroad is no way to fix the economy. War, by whatever name you call it, destroys and does not create, (except bigger egos), and today is would be asinine to take brinksmanship to another level. The outcome would be to destroy civilisation even more quickly.

Perhaps the biggest horror in the box is the elephant in the room of debt, (sorry about the mixed metaphor). The new world is going to have to run on nothing; debt is already beyond recovery, the idea that the future will be better, that it will provide the means of returning to surplus is a dope induced dream. Trade will be in the hands of China who is already pouring money into the poorer nations who will, when the time is ripe, become the cholera rash on the face of the world. The Putin -Trump deal will be no match for that, and although Donald will have departed the scene, his heritage will be the dystopian future in which our descendants have to survive as they curse the stupidity and laziness of their parents. And of their governments, who have always suffered from believing the were clever and astute enough to see and to plan form the future, but who are nearly always not up to it. Especially now, when it would be beyond even the genius of a Lincoln to begin unravelling the mess.

This is the stuff of nightmares, of the unknown to which we are in thrall. It’s way beyond 1984 , Brave New World or The Handmaid’s Tale. This is a new world we are bequeathing our grandchildren and theirs. It’s the reality of all the ancient warnings and predictions.

It may be that the world is sick of our depredations, and is fighting back.

Lindsay, looking sadly at sunsets in