From Our Subscribers

From our subscribers:

1. I must say, tonight's alert was quite the judgmental rant. I know we have

quite a few issues here at home however....

Floyd-Sincere apologies to all when I go "too far". My goal is to provide fervor and catalyst, and to get us to "think". Often in this country we believe news bites and forget the obvious. We take few consequences for our actions well. I do not mean to judge, only to provide stimuli.

2. Hey Floyd,

You have no idea how much I love your commentaries. My wife and I read your vacation plastic scenario together and she just smiled because she has listened to me complaining about the exact same things as well!

Beside our faith and political affiliation...you are I are on the exact same wavelength. I look forward with great anticipation to reading your alerts...just the education alone is worth the subscription.

I just wanted to remind you that I am learning so much through your service and I appreciate our relationship.

6 more weeks of paper trading to go and I am becoming more and more confident! I love your system.

Have a great day tomorrow with your lovely bride!

Where are you guys headed?

God Bless you brother...safe travels!

Floyd-The more we know how we act the more we can act as if we know. When we as a nation ignore our own issues while judging others, and attempting to change them, we make frightening errors. For example the recent Supreme Court decision on the right to bear arms is less important than the rights to health insurance that are denied a large percentage of our own populace.

3. Floyd,

I have been doing much reading (as always) and I came across this. I learn as much as I can about everything that I can and I found this stuff as I was searching solstice cycles and their relationship to time. Absolutely fascinating. Anyhow, this was extremely captivating as well and from what I was able to read on the review, struck home in so many ways with me, this guy could be me, or I could be him, he is much more eloquent then I have ever been though. It also totally reminded me of you regarding political, planetary, resource, religious, commentary in your alerts. Check it out... If I assumed wrong by thinking of you as I read this, I apologize in advance. At the very least learn another's perspective of our world with the passion that we have for ours.

Dave

Author: Derrick Jensen
Book Title: endgame vol I and II

Some clips from a review of the books:
.
Derrick Jensen speaks much as he writes: eloquently, haltingly, off-the-cuff; his insights and remarks are brilliant, provocative, profound, disturbing, irreverent, politically incorrect -- no matter what your politics are. While politics in the conventional sense is the game of power and its subsidiary ethics, here we have a more radical approach to living in the world than accepting the myopia of the urban lifestyle; now nature is reintroduced to the equation.

Nature (including plant and animal species, ecosystems of land, water and air, and traditional subsistence peoples) is no stranger to the inequation of power, suffering these 60 or 100 centuries of abuse, rape, plunder and blunder, burning, rending, killing, enslaving, forgetting. Now up for discussion, for once, is the Endgame, as Derrick calls his latest two-volume study of what is involved in the necessary dominance and even more necessary demise of civilization.


Civilization is characterized by cities, which require (DJ’s emphasis) for its people the importation of food and related resources . . . and therefore it requires the coerced or forcible removal of those necessities from the hinterland, the colonies, the rural poor, the wilderness, the stolen land. The end of the game comes with the end of denial.


The hardest step in the recovery program is the first step, which is to awake from denial. So important and so immense, in fact, is this first step, that the entire two volumes of Endgame (I: The Problem of Civilization; II: Resistance) are devoted to it, as was the entire address tonight. A single questioner after the talk inquired about the kind of society that might replace the one that has brought itself and everything else along with it to the brink of universal ruination; but Derrek begged off that question, as he had the earlier one, “What can we do?”


“Your actions will come with the gifts you have to bring,” was his answer (and here we find a refreshingly Emersonian version of democracy, to oppose to the current Orwellian distortions of that noble principle). In the meantime the more pressing matter -- “the axe held over the head” -- must be addressed, immediately, and it will take every ounce of our attention. The only way we can give it our proper attention is to recognize the extent of the emergency.


That we actually have an emergency situation on our hands is a logical if not always visible fact of a lifestyle based on nonrenewable or overzealously harvested resources. But we can only continue to be lulled for so long by belief in the romantic dream and hope of civilization-forever-after, as most of the dying is still hidden (except when 80% of those in the audience raise their hands at the question “How many of you have lost a loved one to cancer?”), and everything keeps whistling away (though at a higher and higher pitch of anxiety and tension), toward the edge of the cliff, with noses lifted high in the air (as if to hide with pride the stench of extinction and genocide) .

Or we do know better, but we pleasantly forget (tonight, after all, was game 6 of the baseball playoffs . . . “Maybe the Indians will win this time,” quipped Derrick). Or we should know better, but we take action believing our citizen-ship enterprise can be salvaged, and so we continue to vote, and to buy, steal or pray for our clean water and nutritious food from elsewhere without ever giving anything back, not in humble sacrifice of sacred respect or stewardship, nor truly fair price and trade to those in a distant land. Come to think of it, what would a truly fair price be, in the whole ecological scheme of things? The answer could well be, as Derrick Jensen suggests, no price at all -- but rather our sacrifice of such power, in favor of the power of our willingness to listen to our local landbase and its native peoples for instructions on how to survive.

A decade ago I wrote a review of some similarly end-of-history overviews, with one notable programme (The Millennium Project) recognizing on the one hand the same impossibility of continuing on the present path of overconsumption, while refusing to “go backward” to an uncivilized state of nature. The solution instead was foreseen in deep space, where humans could continue their divine mission to “go forth and multiply” indeed forever, through the infinity of space with its endless “resources” for the taking. This fantasy is moot by now as the window has already passed for such a project to be launched from an overabused earth (as the author warned at the time of its writing a decade ago). Without that vain hope to sustain us; and likewise without the Maoist vision of a populist agrarian utopia; and likewise without the neo-liberal dream of universal democracy (now blown to tatters by its neo-conservative evil twin embarked on an openly fascist imperial agenda); and likewise without the green delusions of happy hippy ecotopias recycling bicycle tires to the end of time; we are left with the one course that is both natural and humane. That final remedy is the bitterest pill to swallow; but unlike the “final solution” of the holocaust, it is the path of finding a hard yet possible future by making the hardest choices now.

It is a hard and bitter path because we have been so utterly convinced that it is the wrong one, the one to leave behind, the one to eradicate and transform and evolve from; and we have grown so utterly dependent on our short-lived alternative, so beguiling with its comfort and ease and excess, so intoxicating with its riches transferred to us from the other side: the invisible earth, the silent victims, the dispossessed. Of course we don’t want to slide back to the Stone Age. We will go kicking and screaming backwards, or kicking and screaming forwards -- sacrificing our comfort, or others’ lives and livelihoods, in the process -- but go we will, to the unpromised land, the land finally free of unsustainable promises. Today or tomorrow, one way or another, by our action or inaction, we will go out of our false and manufactured Eden, into the wilderness; we will find our way home.

The Link to this Blog where this can be read in its entirty: http://www.alternativeculture.com/blog/2007/10/beyond-politics.html