What is different today from the 1929 economic crash that birthed the Great Depression, or the Dust bowl that brought devastating hardship to the midwest of America from 1931-1939? These past events have much to say about major changes in human life, including World War I, the passing of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote (1920), the creation of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1938 , that set a new course for society and the means of production.
In the present, I am an 87 year old male. If I were working the land or the employee of a local business in the early part of the 20th century, what did my life look like? What was the daily grind?
What did life look like when threatened by natural conditions bringing epic droughts lasting for years, or to the Great Plains of the midwest during the Dust Bowl, immense fires, and inescapable devastation to huge portions of America’s population affecting major food supplies? Death, starvation, captive in the geographic space of one’s livelihood, nowhere to get away or avoid meeting yet another insufferable day. Ambiguity, uncertainty, anxiety—like now.
The difference in the natural phenomenon is in its influence, the subject of natural life processes of nature, arbitrarily picking and choosing like a virus looking for a feasting on one of nature’s other life manifestations.
I don’t worry so much about getting acquainted with a deadly visitor—novel coronavirus—as I do about the fragmenting of the basic supply system that supports the whole of the present human species.
It not only destroys the lives of tens-of-thousands, maybe millions of individuals, it destroys the totality of relational interactions that are essential to production of means needed to provide for the whole group, the collection of individuals called the community, as well as in the individual experience.
This feels all encompassing—like a dust cloud that threatens everything and everyone—there is no escape for anyone when the production of life-means is broken.
Once it is fragmented, jobs and income cease in the working class of people, business functions end, and resources vanish in availability. The whole of it can’t be put back together like Humpty Dumpty because the interdependent pieces are unavailable or absent—like a brain injury.
I am fearful that what we need to survive will cease to be available, erased from the system—currency can’t buy what isn’t there. Money will no longer matter—losing its value.
The loss of value of currency will break down the status relationships of production and distribution. The absence and/or distortions of power will revert to the ancient animal dialogue of militant dominance through force. It will come from both above and below in the social hierarchy in the arcane interactions of mindless feelings of fear, threat, and the need to provide for oneself in any way possible, without compassion—especially in alignment with the desperation of others. Gangs and polarized conceptions of enemies, blame, anger, rage and death. Civilization collapses, primal humanity rises.
This is the character of the ‘Nature Nightmare’ I envision. Is this any different than what other humans have experienced in the past?
Yes! It is different by 7.6 billion times more implosive.
This danger is real and yet to unfold.