What's Next?

So the Grievous Oligarchy Party has, on behalf of those few who already have everything, have taken by hook and crook the final pillar of this old republic.  Any legitimacy of our institutions is truly forfeit.  Power and money now rule people who once ruled themselves.

And now they're going to war.  Now, it doesn't feel, to me, today, like nuclear annihilation of humanity is certain or imminent.  But it also doesn't feel very far-fetched.  And I suspect that if the day comes, for many of us it will be a bit of a surprise, even now.


Just in case we don't have a lot longer, I want to thank the people who have touched my life.  I hope I've made you smile; that's the most rewarding thing I've found in life.  My thanks to you.  To everyone who's made me smile, and who's made anybody smile.  Humanity has in many ways become a blight on this little blue orb in our little arm of our not-terribly-unique galaxy in our grand cosmos, but I'm happy to have existed.  We are what we are.  We like to pretend that isn't so, that there's "us" and "them".  I do it too.  Right up there, I call out some of us as power-hungry.  Tyrannical.  Illegitimate.  Dishonest.

We're all just humans, which have a tangled and snarly genetic ancestry.  We grew capable of guiding our own development, building our own significance.  That was a neat trick.  We don't know any other critters who managed it.  We even grew capable of authoring our own ending, releasing our own constructs.  It's a shame, it's a waste.  But that is power.

That is what we acquired.  Power does not care whether it is stolen piecemeal or granted by unanimous consent or a byproduct of natural physics.  Power made us, and will some day, some way, unmake us.  Gravitational dances of rocks wield more power than anything we humans have faffed around with.  We can shape and transform our own little sphere, to an extent.  We have the power to destroy everything everybody has ever built, and to feed and care for everybody who's here now.  Most of the time we use our power without such concentration.  Destroy a bit here, care a bit there.

So, what happens next?  There's no "them" to ask, just us.  All of us: what's next?


[ Edit about the whole "going to war" bit: It seems increasingly likely that this was just a bit of illegally-conducted theatre, but we're talking about an unstable amateur bombing an unstable region, and a complicit congress which talks big but does very little to restrain the madmanchild. Let's hope I'm overreacting, like I was about Citizens United and rich bastards lying to us. Oh wait. ]

[ Second edit: Oh for crying out loud what are we doing. ]