Opinion: The pendulum keeps swinging through our lives

Written By CONSTANCE SCRAFIELD

Well, well. The whirring noise you may think you can hear from time to time – is it in your head, just below the audible decibels, nagging like a mosquito in the far corner of your bedroom at three o'clock in the morning? Or do you think you can detect that mean little racket coming from somewhere, making you almost turn around to see if you can spot the source?

That whirring noise is the metaphorical pendulum that we talk about as measuring the course of our human thinking fashions. Very conservative back to oh, so liberal – everyone wears black back to a love of colour – a generation of idle youth on to young people being so ambitious.

“The swing of the pendulum,” we say, have said, for a very long time, of our back-and-forth same ways, repeating themselves over and over, in an almost predictable rhythm. Now, though, the poor old pendulum is jerking this way and that, as we bungle through the months and years. Time seems to fly but every minute is packed with other contradictions, so that we really don't know where we are, except sitting on both sides of the fence at once.

It is the struggle of power versus sanity that has intensified in recent years. There have always been despots on every level of human collectives: social, business, morally (religion), every type of politics, even those without a name. However, not until recently has there been such evidence of, at least aspiring, despots in western (Europe and  Britain – until someone makes up its mind – and North America) politics. Trump, of course, wants to be what Michael Moore has called him: “The last president of the United States.” He is working on claiming the presidency as a throne for the rest of his life and Pence will be glad to accede to that position, in due course, if all goes well.

Baby Trump or Trump mimic, Doug Ford, is throwing his weight around right away, jumping into the deep, luscious waters of tyranny, doing everything wrong, skimming the rim of technically legal and ignoring, with righteous distain, the sense of it. 

Both these tyrants-in-waiting have a full regime of followers, soaking in their con, hoping to be noticed for misplaced loyalty, making the old timers who wrote those laws, regret their short-sightedness or foolish confidence to think no villain would ever come into power and misuse them.

Don't think for a moment that Ford will be shy of employing the police to quell protests once he is tired of them.

I have to hand, as of yesterday, a book called Drawdown, in which, as many have pointed out, there is massive scientific evidence, research and help to show how dangerous, to be sure: fatally so, our current track on climate is.

This American book offers, in considerable details, how to turn things around with alternative and wholly viable ways and means for powering and feeding this earth and its population.

Drawdown is collection of very erudite essays written by experts on the subjects involved with resolutions to the ongoing and very frightening course our businesses (them first, don't doubt that either), industry, agriculture, politics, you and me are steering the world around us to disaster.

Take a look at the history making storms and weather conditions, all of which are predicted as becoming the new normal. How are people going to keep up with recovery if they are always being knocked down again? How do you keep rebuilding people's lives, people's psyches?

Why, in the face of Nature offering really serious evidence of the pay-back on how badly we have betrayed our stewardship of this planet, when do we stop talking about taking many decades to do what must be done now and “get it”?

I know, I know it is about money and who holds the purse strings. Yet, they are already

spending mountains of money in the same old wrong directions. All that huge money (on pipelines, for example) can be directed into alternative sources of power, with very reasonable prospects for making profits relatively soon.

Investing money in the same kind of timeline, employing people, and reaping the financial rewards, by critically reducing/replacing our use of fossil fuels, harmful GMO's, ruinous pesticides, impossibly devastating methods of handling meat production.

There are mechanical ways of collecting carbon, and of using Nature's ways to restore clean air with trees, for goodness' sake, for our sakes.

It is like a roller coaster out of control: like an ugly mathematical equation: total upheaval of the natural state of the earth implies severe imbalance of social thinking, leading to improbable and virtually insoluble geopolitical questions and – hence – the combined result is unending: conflict between extreme ideologies and extreme reaction of the earth  by way of volcanos, earthquakes, massive storms and unquenchable fires.

What about our grandchildren?