Riding the Escalator of Extinction

The Great Disaster we’re all a part of isn’t the one in the headlines. It’s not a sudden catastrophe. A day of horror. An explosion on a street. Planes hurtling into high rises. It’s long and drawn out, incident after incident, law after law, arrest after arrest, murder after murder–none of which are the Great Disaster, but each are a part of it. More like a movement of tectonic plates–every tremor, every seismic event, is but the visible part of an imperceptible change of the landscape, of the shape of a continent. More like the melting of the Greenland icepack… we see the calving of the icebergs, as spectacular as they are, but not the rising of the oceans–which doesn’t happen in an hour or a day. I’m speaking of the end of this civilization… of all that’s been built on and dependent on the delusional machinery of capitalism and nation states that it created to serve it. We can feel it cumulatively… feel that everything is changing, the world as we have believed it be is already no more, but then… it looks not that much different than yesterday, or the day before, and we go about our lives, oblivious of the escalator of extinction we’re all riding together. inevitable as growing old… noticeable only when we look back a decade, or two or three, and see the marks of death written across our every feature.