rapid transit

Events of the past month have made painfully obvious that we've entered what Jim Kunstler calls "The Long Emergency." I prefer the more user-friendly term "rapid transition." Only the unconscious and those committed to ideological orthodoxy fail to appreciate this.

A lot of people are baffled and don't know what to do to be able to deal with the new realities. But there are three things everybody can do right now, and we're crazy if we don't.

1. Get a bicycle, and ride it. For most, the second part is the hard part. It's either that or ride the bus. I realize some people have to travel long distances to work. OK then, I didn't say "ride it all the time." But I don't think there's a car-dependent family in this country that couldn't convert a lot of the errands and recreational trips now done by car to two wheels, saving thousands of miles and hundreds of gallons a year.

A lot of people who have bikes don't ride them. But now there is fierce and compelling urgency behind the command, "Get off your rusty dusty and just do it." Park the car and leave it.

And don't tell me you can't do it. I'm doing it, and I'm a 66-year old man with emphysema, the result of 50 years of smoking cigarettes while driving cars. If I can do it, nearly anybody can.

2. Stop eating meat. Or if you must, make it chicken, and try to show a little respect for the creature you're devouring by finding out whether it had a real life, as opposed to a slow death on the wire.

But red meat is out. I know that's a tough one for a lot of people, but consider: According to the UN, livestock grazing takes up about 26 percent of the earth's land surface, and cultivation of feed crops presently requires about a third of arable land. In addition, livestock is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions -- that's more than transportation puts out, world-wide. Not only that, but too much of the stuff is bad for you.

Besides, if you've ever seen a cattle feedlot or a factory-style pig farm up close, you probably don't want to eat that stuff anyway.

Fish is OK if it's caught in the wild.

3. Don't listen to them. The reason there are no political solutions to Kunstler's Long Emergency is because all the truly important members of the political caste have been bought up, whether they're actively on the take or not. They're relegated to serving as water carriers and gophers for the corporate oligarchy, without whose approval they could not have risen to where they are, and who are our true rulers. That's why Obama seems impenetrably stupid sometimes, even though we know he's not, especially on matters such as the Afghan War.

The Oligarchy is now so isolated and out of touch with real people's lives, and hence reality, than they can't imagine the world functioning on any terms other than what they've known in the past, which was characterized by growth made possible by readily available, cheap petroleum and easy credit. Both of those things have vanished and won't ever return,

The main reason we need to stop listening to them is to free our own minds of habits and entrenched attitudes about the world and our place in it that have become unconscious and almost reflexive. Andrew McDonald on his site Radical Relocalization describes the ideological inertia all of us suffer this way: "We've lived in that old story for a very long time and its back story - that growth is good and inevitable - is so in our bones, so embodied in us literally that new thinking doesn't affect it much. The Industrial Revolution and the turbo-charge provided by fossil fuel has strengthened these assumptions. We maintain them in small unnoticed ways. When we go shopping or to work, when we talk to friends - we're actors in a world where the script is still the old story about progress and growth and we bow to that story's conventions before we know it. If we watch TV or advertising, it's the old story, even if with some new lines."

Key to changing our thinking is to stop feeding bullshit about "the recovery" or "nation building in Afghanistan" into the hopper, and that can be most efficiently accomplished by swearing off what are commonly known as "mainstream" media. The stenographers and glitzy talking heads of the infotainment industry are nearly universally oblivious to the fact that in these times all viable activity will proceed from the only revelation that matters -- John the Revelator said it best in the opening lines of his 21st chapter: "And I saw a new heaven, and a new earth: for the first heaven, and the first earth were passed away..."