Last week my wife and daughter flew down to California to spend a week looking at colleges. She’s a junior, so this is about an event that’s more than a year away. Yet, despite all that’s happening in our world, we’re still trying to plan as if life then will be the same as life now, so all that matters is: does she like the campus, can she get in, and can we afford it.

In the ten days that they were away, four airlines went out of business (Aloha Airlines, ATA, Skybus, and Champion Air), two of the remaining large airlines (Delta and Northwest) announced a desperation merger, and two others (Southwest and American) were embroiled in money-losing maintenance scandals. As this was happening, the lifeblood of the industry — oil — got ever more expensive, while the major providers of that lifeblood, for a variety of “shoulda seen it coming” reasons, showed increasing reluctance to deal with America as a priority trading partner.

So, though my daughter does not want to hear it, my firm and fixed contribution to the “where should I go?” question is, “Any place that doesn’t involve air travel.”

Americans are playing one huge game of musical chairs — everybody flying and driving from this place to that, travel-nation, America-on-the-move — all fueled by ever-more-tenuous and no longer cheap oil. It seems inevitable that a tipping point will occur and most all the travel (except for the very rich) will STOP.

When that happens, wherever you happen to be is your new home. Chances are the locals in your new home will be woefully unprepared for global economic collapse and not at all happy adding the care of strangers to their mounting problems.

My daughter’s not listening — she’s always seen herself going to an East Coast school, and is especially taken with the prospect of living in New York City (that sound you heard was her mother’s head exploding). So we’re all in “wait and see” mode — I would love nothing more than to be utterly wrong about all of this and smiling wide as I put her on a plane to embark on her exciting new life.

Doesn’t hurt to dream. Until the music stops….

Since world-wide economic collapses are rare events and since the world has somewhat changed since the last one, we can all be forgiven for not knowing the best ways to prepare. And, since we still don’t know if such a collapse is certain or not, we could also be forgiven for not preparing at all. Especially if, as I’ve written before, one has prepared unnecessarily for past “imminent” collapses that never happened.

However, with images of Katrina and other unplanned-for disasters in mind, the consequences of not planning for a disaster that actually occurs are grave, in every sense of the word.

So, the neighbors and I have been pondering this conundrum and what we’ve come up with is Rule #1: make sure that you are able to feed yourself, family and neighbors, without resorting to food that requires any oil-inputs (for fertilizers, factory farming, packaging, processing, or transportation) and  without engaging in any survivalist hoarding.

I should mention here that I live on an island, population around 4500, an hour ferry’s ride from America. The Washington State ferry system has been suffering from anti-government, anti-tax attacks since the early ’90s and was already showing alarming signs of breakdown before the price of oil started rising. Now we consider it a given that ferry service will continue to seriously decline, and a high probability that at some point it will stop altogether, or be reserved to the very few who can pay super-sized ticket prices.

So, even if the world manages to avoid world-wide economic collapse, our little world will change and either food shipped from the mainland will become way too expensive or will just stop coming altogether, or, the best case scenario, we will be limited to buying one or two staples that we just can’t give up but can’t produce on our own (such as rice).

We’re rejecting hoarding for several reasons. Practically-speaking, we have neither the money nor the storage space for setting aside large stocks of provisions. Yet even if we did, you can only store so much for so long — sooner or later, if you can’t produce your own food, you’re dead. Lastly, if you’re all stocked up, but you’re surrounded by people who aren’t, you’re going to need weapons also, and you’ll need to be able to let children starve to death without intervening.

Yuck on that.

So, A lot of soil being turned over this spring, seeds going in the ground, more chickens being added to roosts, a lot of thinking about the water supply. Back to basics.

The best thing about this approach is that even if the collapse never happens, everything we’ve done was really worth doing.

Way back in the 20th century, long before this internet thing, I used to publish a quarterly newsletter. In one of the first issues, twenty-two years ago, I wrote:

A good friend asked the other day if I was still into “the doom thing.” I both cringed and chuckled at the sound of her words, paused for a few moments, inwardly sighing, and then answered, “Yes, I guess I am.” 

She was alluding to my belief that we are living at a time of vast planetary change — our entire world shifting toward a long-awaited age of peace and honest relationship — and that necessary to the shift is a certain degree of personal and global upheaval; a time when social and political uprisings, economic dislocations, and extreme environmental difficulties all were fairly unavoidable; and a time when pain would surely follow every old refusal to let go and change.

Though I prefer terms like “planetary transformation” and “quantum leap in consciousness” and “global evolution,” I recognize and accept that there is a dark side of human suffering to all such possibilities, hence my association with “the doom thing.”

My tendency toward apocalyptic thinking goes all the way back to the early ’70s when it seemed there was no way to undo the problems of American culture short of a total breakdown. Yet somehow we sailed through Viet Nam and Nixon’s impeachment and the gas crisis of the Carter years with barely a hitch.

The Reagan years saw similar seemingly intractable problems — Star Wars and the rest of the Cold War money drain; trading arms with the enemy and other political fiascos; and such economic troubles as the Savings and Loans swindle — so again I looked toward massive breakdown as inevitable and again was wrong.

At that point I pretty much shelved the “doom thing.” I would soon become both a parent and a homeowner and, frankly, the status quo no longer seemed all that terrible.

As Y2K approached, I was fairly persuaded by the doom argument, but practically speaking, there was little my family could do about it. We had no extra income to spend on stocking up food and such, and even if we’d had the money, we had no place to put it all. So we just hunkered down, and were relieved when yet another doom train failed to arrive.

But here we go again. This time we face a number of doom-bringers, each of which looks to have the power to bring down civilization all by itself. Peak oil, global warming, global warring, the collapse of free-market capitalism, super viruses and other modern plagues — and through it all the feeling that we have seen the end of America’s amazing resiliency.

So, grimace and sigh, yes, I still believe in the doom thing, more than ever.

I just wish I  knew what to do about it.

For some time I’ve been finding it hard to sit down and write. I’ve tried to ignore it as simple writer’s block, figuring the muse would wake up at some point and I’d be back at it.

But here’s my real problem: I just can’t waste another moment thinking about the powers-that-be in government, the media and big biz who are destroying this country, and with it the world; am not willing to spend one more iota of my precious consciousness on the contemplation of George W Bush and his cohort of war criminals; and, frankly, must concede that none of my writing has made an effing bit of difference.

Ouch.

Those of you who have sent emails over the years telling me I was too angry and too consumed with Bush-bashing were right, mostly. Though I don’t want to ever be the sort of person who could witness a major crime against humanity without getting angry and needing to do something to stop it, I’ve known for some time that my writing wasn’t resolving the anger or solving any problems.

So, I’m going to try to take the advice that was usually added to those emails: I will focus on the issues of personal, social, and environmental healing. I will never mention Bush again, nor will I participate in the endless, screeching noise-fest that passes for political commentary in this country.

I continue to believe that the vast majority of people are good, decent, and naturally inclined toward living in peace; that our problem is with a very small percentage of “dominists” who will do anything to retain wealth and power; and that our quandary is that we can not defeat them using their methods: force begets force, violence begets violence, domination begets domination.

This has been the doom of every right-intentioned revolution or resurrection in human history — as good as it feels to turn the tables on the dominators, any use of dominating force only results in another dominist system.

I see two ways out of this conundrum. The first requires that those who hold the power voluntarily and with full sincerity choose to share that power. No war, no fight, no struggle for dominance. Rather, the very people with the most power to effect change come to their senses and do the right thing.

Solution number two requires that global dominism suffer a total collapse, with millions dying in the ensuing chaos. If we’re lucky, out of the ashes something better emerges.

Much as I would like to believe in the first possibility, I think we all should start preparing for latter.

With so many signs of a nation unravelling —

• the budget-squandering, shame-spawning militarism;
• the self-serving foolishness of American unilateralism;
• the kowtowing to religious fundamentalists;
• the age-old campaign against the rights of women;
• the rampant “all-american” xenophobia;
• the fubar demise of our so-called free market economy;
• and, our idiot inaction in the face of urgent environmental concerns….

— isn’t it great that our presidential hopefuls are devoting their campaigns to media-manufactured hullaballoos over which advisor said what offensive-to-somebody-somewhere-thing or which old friend is not a media-approved perfect American citizen?

As Kurt Vonnegut once remarked: “There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.”

When they write the history of the fall of the American empire, they will point to this time and note how in one election after another we managed to avoid all of the critical issues of the day. Or at best dealt with monumentally complex problems with farce debates and sound-bite electioneering.

Actual candidates who have clue are quickly branded as unelectable. Which leaves, inevitably, politicians, not leaders. Which means that the actual governance of a great nation is all about the political game, rather than the issues of the day.

Maybe Obama’s just playing the game to win, and once in office will dazzle us all with sweeping progressivism. You gotta hope!

Or maybe Vonnegut’s right and we should be concerned about the mental health of anybody who wants the job of cleaning up George W Bush’s mess.

When we make mistakes here at ThinkingPeace, we go for HUGE. Last week we moaned about the “trillion dollars” Bush had wasted on his idiot wars. But before the pixels had even dried on the screen, Joseph Stiglitz (former chief economist at the World Bank who won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics in 2001) released his latest analysis of US war spending and came up with an estimate of 3 trillion dollars.

Our calculations are based on conservative assumptions. They are conceptually simple, even if occasionally technically complicated. A $3 trillion figure for the total cost strikes us as judicious, and probably errs on the low side. Needless to say, this number represents the cost only to the United States. It does not reflect the enormous cost to the rest of the world, or to Iraq.

All wars, even the “good” ones, require that nations engage in significant denial of inconvenient truths. War-think simply (and mostly unconsciously) ignores anything that might blunt or lessen a nation’s resolve in the face of combat. Lies about the enemy abound, as do lies about the so-called causes leading to conflict. And when there is any public opposition to a war then lies about spending — how much and where it’s all coming from — are a given.

Even more tragic, though, are the lies of omission,, the long-term costs we never even consider: to the environment, to the families of returning soldiers, and to a range of societal problems that inevitably worsen — at increasing costs to all of us — when we spend money and resources on destruction rather than creation.

CURRY: You don’t agree with that? It has nothing do with the economy, the war — spending on the war?

BUSH: I don’t think so. I think actually the spending in the war might help with jobs…because we’re buying equipment, and people are working. —Think Progress

Explains a lot, doesn’t it? We sink a trillion dollars into his idiot wars, and he’s claiming victory because a handful of his rich friends are getting richer. The wars go badly, the economy is tanking, but life looks good in Bushville because somebody’s raking in obscene profits.

We can all be thankful that this reign of errors is almost over. But we have to wonder whether President Obama will be able to seriously change the war machine. As Robert Scheer writes:

The U.S. already spends more than the rest of the world combined on its military, without a sophisticated enemy in sight. The Bush budget cuts not a single weapons system, including the most expensive ones, those designed to combat a Soviet military that no longer exists. Those sophisticated weapons have nothing to do with combating terrorism and everything to do with jobs and profits that motivate both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

This is why we are forever marching off to foreign wars, and why we will never win nor stopping fighting the domestic war on drugs: too many people are making money making war. Peace is a huge threat to these people and because they have the weapons, the money, the media, and the political power they won’t give up without a fight.

And fighting for peace is like fucking for chastity — we simply cannot stop them using their means and methods. Which is why millions of people taking to the streets were not enough to stop one little man from having his invasion.

The only peace movement that can change all of this must come from within the power elites. More than anything, we need an American President to finally start doing the right things and to inspire the rest of the politicians and talking heads to get on board.