What We (Darkly) Need

What is needed is an event that will succeed in stunning the North American moneyed and powerful classes--the arrogant upper socio-economic tier--along with a good part of Europe's elite. What is needed is to stun them long enough that other ideas now gaining currency "at the edges"... of peace; of ecological awareness; of communal sharing and mutual care; of rising, non-exclusive, non-fundamentalist spirituality; of the end of the West's strict subjective-objective divide; of discernment-driven situational ethical insight replacing authority-enforced categorical moral imperative; of nurturing life rather than making war; of the competitive spirit tempered by cooperation replacing the elevation of competition to the highest virtue; of flattening hierarchies; etc., etc.... as I say, we need an event lasting long enough so that different sets of ideas and practices than those which built the edifice of banditry characterizing the Euro-American success story (now being aggressively adopted by former colony nation-states around the globe) will have a chance to obtain sufficient scope to change the human world before it is too late to prevent its destruction (along with up to half the earth's species now alive). Our need is to stun the vested powerful interests who will insist upon resisting any significant change to the status quo from which they derive everything they hold dear long enough so that other ways of thinking gain sufficient currency and momentum, so that when they, these "elites," wake up, as they will, and come out of their stunned reveries, they will be forced to "catch up" and go along with decisions, policy directions and events they otherwise would have had no part of, and forcefully resisted.

What sort of event might do this? One might have thought that the events of 11 September 2001, or the recent banking-industry-mediated economic and financial meltdown, or (more positively), even the election in 2008 of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States of America would have accomplished at least a part of what is needed, as described above, but as we are all able to see, each of these is proving to be successfully "managed."

Certainly, if for nothing else, out of justice toward the poor nations upon which catastrophe typically falls, and who suffer so much when it does, such an event as the event we need, has to fall exclusively or primarily upon the USA, particularly, east-coast, Old Money USA (but reaching the entire nation), with spill-over effects falling on Western Europe, too, and possibly the Mediterranean.

What can do this? At first, I would have been tempted to advocate that a nation like Russia, Pakistan or Israel arrange to detonate a series of strategically located nuclear weapons in low earth orbit above the US. Blast, fallout and thermal effects of low earth orbit nuclear explosions such as these would not reach the surface, sparing surface inhabitants the typical carnage that follows nuclear attack. The only effect which would reach the surface is the vitally important Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP), which would, ideally, fry most North American electronic devices, and bring down most or all of the nation's electrical grid. That would be an example of the kind of event we need. As I say, at first I would have been tempted to suggest this as a possible solution. The problem is with the USA's likely response. It would be extremely difficult to hide the origin of such an attack, and the US still would have all those ocean-shielded, working nuclear submarines. Whatever nation that was determined to have made the attack would be nuclear bombed--and likely not in low earth orbit. No, the psyche of the US is much too unstable for something like this scenario to unfold with much of any positive outcome.

What then, can we honestly hope for? It turns out that we might be able to turn toward the sun. A sufficiently large solar "mega-flare" that erupted at just the right moment might direct the full force of its effects upon the continental US just fine, with EMP-like consequences for the North American electrical grid.

Certainly, ordinary American folk would feel the effects of such a catastrophe. It is hard to imagine anything of sufficient power to do what needs to be done which would avoid that, but with cooperation and help from abroad, relief efforts might mitigate much of the worst for most people, in the early days and weeks. (Furthermore, it is only fair that the people who up to now have enjoyed taking sixty percent of the world's resources with something like five percent of the world's population feel the full brunt of a disaster to fall precisely upon the way of life that is a direct cause of this inequity.) Meanwhile, the necessity for the power elite to go about by ordinary means like everyone else, and to have to go before the world, hands out, asking for relief, would do much to reverse the here-to-fore tendency toward Ugly American Arrogance. The mighty will have been brought low, and stunningly so. Because a mega solar flare would destroy nearly all the highly specialized equipment that constitutes the US inter-tied electrical grid as it now exists, it is estimated that the US would take years to fully recover from such an event. (With sufficient power in the flare, even many cars and trucks would "go down"--at least until clever mechanics could get to them with fixes.) In the days and weeks (and even years) following the initial turmoil of catastrophe, the people of this nation would have to discover different, more local, more cooperative, more energy-efficient, more life-centered ways for doing almost everything. Ideas having to do with how this might happen that operate presently only on the socioeconomic periphery would necessarily rise into the mainstream of the new American culture. (The Chicago School of Economics would come to be understood for the intellectual fraud that it is, for example.)

So, assuming that intention consciously set affects the cosmos in some fashion, here is what we must aim for. Here is the intent we must set. Between summer solstice and fall equinox of 2012 or 2013 (the years of the projected upcoming solar maximum), at which point the sun is at an ideal seasonal declination for maximum impact upon the United States of America, we must "ask the sun" for an extremely large solar flare and/or coronal mass ejection 10,000 times the energy of the 1989 solar flare which brought down the electrical grid in Quebec, Canada--a flare of sufficient power to destroy the US electrical grid, and most of its unprotected business and consumer electronics.

Admittedly, this is a huge disaster, but it is the gentlest one I am able to think of, coming short of the one we are presently making, promising to end everything we ever knew, or are capable of knowing--the entire world in which our species evolved (and, likely, ourselves as well). Do you honestly think, without something unpredictable "coming from outside" that the Principalities and Powers that Be who rule the status quo will allow the kinds of changes we need to happen in time to avoid runaway, six degree global warming? I am a person with financially privileged friends who consider themselves enlightened, and admittedly, in some things, they are, but even so, they don't believe that human extinction is a real possibility, or that our present circumstances require any urgent action. Magnify that outlook by a hundred-thousand-fold (or taking in the entire human "globalized" world, a million-fold), and it is quite easy to see that without "help", They. Will. Do. Nothing.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma

http://www.srrb.noaa.gov/highlights/sunrise/glossary.html

http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/celsph.html

http://www.physorg.com/news162653480.html

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1206

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse

http://www.unitedstatesaction.com/emp-terror.htm

http://www.myfootprint.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/footprint_basics_overview/

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/television/2004169908_lookout10.html

http://www.marklynas.org/

http://www.celsias.com/article/six-degrees-examines-global-warmings-impact/


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