I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus

It was about 10 O’clock on a cold December night in 1968. I was sitting at my desk, in my room, in my parent’s house, looking at a little purple pill I had purchased earlier that day. 100 micrograms of LSD. Fueled by equal amounts of boredom and curiosity I swallowed it down with some flat root beer and waited for whatever that was going to happen … happen.

About 30 minutes later we had liftoff and I, and everything else on the planet, was zooming around the sun at about 67,000 miles an hour.

Sometime later, who knows when … my watch melted … I had an overwhelming realization that All is One … and everything is interconnected. Or as the psychedelic Three Musketeers might have said, “All is One and One is All.“

Now I could have stumbled upon that concept had I ever done any reading about Pantheism, the belief that Nature is divine and we humans are part of the One, interconnected whole. As John Muir wrote, “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.“

I had not read the Vedas, or the Upanishads, nor studied the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus. And even if I had … I don’t think it would have had the same kind of epiphanous impact supplied by that little purple pill.

As the sun rose I quickly packed. I took my college textbooks out of my book bag and stuffed in some clothes. I had $7.50 and a half a pack of Marlboros. I left my parent’s house that morning with a head humming with the last vestiges of the acid. Time to hit the road.

Cut to 43 years later …

Here we all are … still orbiting the sun at about 67,000 miles an hour on a planet ravaged by The Dominant Culture that ignores the fact that everything, and that includes us, is part of an interconnected whole.

Our civilization is completely dependent upon inexpensive fossil fuels that will run out sometime in the next 20 to 50 years.

“We have entered an era of extremes in the search for energy.” Naomi Klein said recently. She spoke of the Canadian-Alberta tar sands, which are projected to become the primary source of imported oil to the US this year. The process of turning this petroleum-infused sand into crude oil contributes three times more greenhouse gas pollution than it does to produce conventional oil.

“We are frantically digging to get at the dirtiest, highest-emitting stuff imaginable,” she says. “This is how civilizations commit suicide – by slamming their foot on the accelerator at the exact moment they should be putting on the brakes.“

1.8 billion people will be living with absolute water scarcity within 15 years, and two thirds of the world population could be subject to “water stress” when the demand for water exceeds the available supply.

And if things weren’t bad enough … unchecked global climate change could bring about a total collapse of civilization around the globe.

Now it’s a safe bet that Dick Cheney never dropped acid nor read the Upanishads. But he did come up with an interesting concept on how to deal with possible threats to the security of the United States called … “The One Percent Doctrine.”

Cheney said, “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.”

We know the chance of civilization self-destructing because of Peak Oil, Peak Water, and Global Climate Change is greater than 1%. And yet the Bush-Cheney regime did nothing about it except deny the dangers even existed.

Midway through his first term, it is obvious that Barack Obama is not going to confront Peak Oil or Global Climate Change head on. Like previous administrations, hope remains that gas prices will remain affordable, and economy-disabling shortages will not develop until after he leaves office.

Scientists aren’t in charge of finding solutions to these life or death issues … politicians and economists are.

As Naomi Klein noted, “ … climate policy … is not made based on precaution but rather on cost-benefit analysis: finding the course of action that economists believe will have the least impact on GDP. So rather than asking, as precaution would demand: “How can we act as quickly as possible to avert catastrophe,” we ask bizarre questions like: What is the latest possible moment we can wait before we begin seriously lowering emissions? 2020? 2050? Or, how much hotter can we let the planet get and still survive?“

It has been estimated that it takes 20 years to switch completely from fossil fuels to alternative forms of energy. We didn’t start yesterday … so if we began today … it would take 20 years from now. Nothing is going to happen today. So starting tomorrow … it’ll still be 20 years away. Chances are nothing will be done tomorrow either. It looks like it will always be 20 years from someday. If Bill Clinton was one tenth the visionary he thinks he is … we’d almost be done by now.

Michael Ruppert points out in his book Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World that the psychopathic elite are actively working against solving our global crisis because they’re too busy making money from the collapse. They’ve got a “put option” on the planet and they can’t wait to collect.

This just in from the Department of Redundancy Department … Psychopaths are crazy.

It is not only sheer insanity … but also mass insanity.

We can clearly see the bleak future we are hurtling towards and yet for the most part we are doing nothing to change it.

Why?

Are we waiting for a leader? There won’t be one. There never will be one. No one on NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, or MSNBC will tell us what to do. A Republican or a Democrat is not going to come up with A Plan. We are on our own.

Without a leader it is going to be very very hard. It seems pointless to conserve energy when a navy destroyer uses the same amount of oil in a week than the city of Huntington Beach uses in a year. What good does it do to conserve water when a Palm Springs golf course consumes as much water in a day than a family of four uses in four years?

We must do everything we can do because of the enormous waste built into The Dominant Culture. We’re the only people who can do anything about it. We don’t need a leader to tell us what we already know.

We’ve got to stop. We all have to stop. We’ve just got to Stop! If we don’t stop now … civilization will be torn apart in front of our children’s eyes.

Our actions are mirrored by millions of other people. If we do nothing … millions do nothing. But if we do something … that action will be mirrored around the world.

I believe that because we are all connected, part of The Whole. Heraclitus and Albert Einstein thought so but Augustus Owsley Stanley III made it possible for me to discover it.

Disclaimer: Of course I’ve told my children they should do as I say … not as I did. Psychedelic drug use can lead one to astounding revelations … as well as discovering the moon is trying to kill you.

I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus January 31, 2011