Is This The Last Generation?

Thumbing south way up north in California. Nothing but trees for miles around. Hardly any traffic. Dude driving is moving right along, the road not needing a lot of attention. We're sailing uphill on a warm, sunny Highway 101, when a couple "this lane ends" signs flash by. A slow-moving truck in the middle lane appears on a long, slow turn to the right as we continue to climb. My driver casually cuts over to the fast lane to pass the big semi. I just catch a glimpse of an angled barrier blocking the fast lane as we move into the shadow of the big rig. "This lane ends," I say. "Yeah." "I mean it ends right ahead." "Okay." "HIT THE BRAKES NOW!!!!!" I scream, and dude just starts to hit them when HE sees the barricade, and he mashes down and the tires burn as we start to slide. We're almost stopped when we hit the barricade and ricochet off it into the next lane, just clipping the back tire of the trailer. The truck never even stopped, but we sure took a break and got out for a while, right there. If we'd kept going at that speed and hit the barricade, we'd have been flung right under the heavy trailer right about in front of the back wheels.

From the start, this blog is my way of screaming "Hit the brakes!" about the planet. There are more and more other folks screaming it too, but the drivers are still going, "Yeah, yeah, okay," but not really slowing down. Most of the claims sound corny and the solutions lame and old-fashioned, but cutting the amount of plastic in small water bottles, and calling everything "green" like they did for a while with "natural", isn't going to save any planets. I don't think it's gonna happen, we're all too spoiled, but it's kinda like McMurphy in Cuckoo's Nest, betting everybody that he could lift the big tub-room control panel that was connected with pipes and bolted to the floor. He huffed and he puffed, he strained and lifted, his muscles and veins bulged, but he couldn't budge it. After he admitted defeat and was paying everybody off and they were laughing at him, he said, "Well, at least I tried." Saving the planet isn't being cool like having lots of electronics, but there ain't no cell phones or video games on a dead planet. No Internet, music, sports, movies, skateboards, favorite meals, fancy clothes, hot cars, puppies, sex, bongs, or beer. It's too late for me to lose personally, I had no ties and lived a lifetime of Saturdays and I'm already older than a lot of people ever get. I'd just like to see life go on, just on general principles. It'd be nice.

In early 1969, I went from Southern California about 400 miles north to San Jose with a new girlfriend (Oh, Gerri) for a music festival. (This was months before Woodstock.) When we got up there, we learned there were no tickets available, but that an alternative free concert was being held nearby. So that's where we went. The bands would play the pay concert, then come--sometimes at 3 or 4 a.m.--and play the free one. There were fights and arrests at the pay concert, not a bit of violence at the free one except when a Hell's Angel went up on stage and flung a member of the Jefferson Airplane off the stage and then announced over the microphone, "Happy Birthday, [somebody]." Late the second night there was an almost fight near us. A guy started the ol' barroom-attitude challenge, when his friend said, "Hey, man. These people just won't go for that action around here," and the rowdy guy seemed to realize that it was true, and just stopped. It's the attitude needed to stop all the for-profit nonsense that's killing us. They gotta realize that people just will no longer stand for it.

Eat the rich. I said that to a woman I was working for one time, and she said, "Well maybe somebody just having a sleeping bag is enough for some folks to think that person is rich." Owning a sleeping bag, that shut me up. But today as I type, there are already reports of food riots starting in the poorer countries. (Due to climate change, using grains for fuel, and rising prices, according to reports.) And it's just the beginning. I predict it won't be long in this country before vehicles will have to form a caravan for safety to travel isolated stretches of Interstate highways; lone vehicles will be run off the road and the people robbed. Some people will commit crimes to go to jail to be fed. Home invasions are already happening, but it'll soon be impossible to live in a lone house anywhere in the country with groups of desperate folks wandering around just looking to survive. Group grab-and-run robberies at grocery stores will be happening. All people have a thing about eating, whether the super wealthy feel they got all the riches to themselves now and don't need the rest of us anymore or not. LookOut!

A sci-fi/fantasy series I really like is the Silistra Series by Janet E. Morris. On her planet, after a major world war caused generations to live underground until the planet surface became inhabitable again, the survivors and their descendants devised a new social order. They concentrated on improving the power of their minds, and machines and computers were no longer allowed anywhere on their planet. I don't have these stories listed under "books" on my MySpace profile, but I've long had the heroine, Estri, as one of my heroes, and I used her name for a character in a near-future adventure novel I wrote back in the 1990s. (Unpublished.) "The High Couch of Silistra." "The Golden Sword." "Wind from the Abyss." "The Carnelian Throne." And then she rewrote the first book and called it, "Returning Creation." The sex is a bit brutal for my taste, but it's a harsh world they live on, like Earth maybe a thousand years ago.

And as I write on this Sunday the 13th of April, there's a big to-do about Jimmy Carter planning to visit Hamas, and the candidates are squabbling over if they should or shouldn't meet with this or that world leader. I was working off-and-on in a typical, very small, logging and pot growing town in Northern California. One night I was at a friends cabin when a huge man with casts on both his legs came bursting through the door, very drunk, a short-necked bottle of Bud in hand, and he saw long-haired me standing there with a can of Bud in hand, and he hobbled straight at me, got in my face, and said, "I go out to the reservation and fight! What do YOU do?" Seems he'd been falling a tree and it'd kicked back on him breaking both legs. I'd been around and through the town for many years, but never saw this guy before. Suddenly he was everywhere, always snarling at me and making threats. One day I was thumbing south for a trip to civilization, standing alongside the two-lane blacktop road, when he comes driving his big old boat of a car going into town. He swerves over towards me like he's going to hit me, then just stays in the south lane and with a roaring laugh lobs an empty beer bottle at me. This had to stop. Next time I was in town, I found out he lived in a trailer on a hillside up a dirt road, overlooking the valley. I bought a six-pack of short-necked Budweiser, and on Sunday afternoon when the Forty-Niners were playing, I drove up to his place in a borrowed truck. I knocked on his door, and when he opened it I held up the six-pack and told him I was here to watch the game with him. Turned out there was another guy there who I knew a bit, and we each drank two beers as I sat in Big Man's living room and watched one quarter of the game. Then I said I had to get back to town and left. Live or die, I couldn't live in fear all the time. Sucker never liked me still after that, but I didn't have to worry about running into him anymore, he'd had his shot. Especially with the state of the planet, it's about time these tit-for-tat petty world leaders we all live under get over their silly differences and learn to deal with each other, like it or not. And if getting face to face and bringing things to a head is what it takes, I say do it.

Once people start to get along some, there are lots of ways to enjoy life and have fun without ruining the planet to do it. Details upon request.