What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire Page #5

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understand and view the world?

Or about how unlimited growth, competition,

and production are all unquestionably good?

Or the story that tells us

that we can have and do

anything we think we want,

because there are no limits?

There were people in the world looking

squarely at our cultural stories,

and at the global predicament,

and seeing what I saw.:

our culture, in its present

configuration, could not last.

I was not alone.

But the transformation, or the

collapse, still seemed far away.

It would come one day. But not now.

There was time. There was hope.

Somewhere, there were

people taking care of it all.

And that's how it was for me, year after year.

I lived the middle class American life.

I lived the stories I had learned as a child

and tried as best I could to ignore the

rumblings of fear that haunted my depths.

And then I started to work

on this documentary. . .

Three years later, having chewed our way

through a mountain of books, articles, websites,

magazines, newspapers, and documentaries,

having attended lectures and

meetings and salons and rallies,

and having intervals with friends and neighbors,

scientists and researchers and writers and

activity and thinkers and feelers and more,

and having talked and written and laughed and

cried and worried and despaired and regained

our power to plunge ahead again,

one thing seems clear.:

the global environmental, political and economic

predicament we live in today is critical,

the possible scenarios range

into the highly disturbing,

and the timeframe seems. . . well. . . imminent.

It's as though we've awakened

to find ourselves on a runaway train,

hurtling wildly down the tracks, held

in place by powerful cultural stories

and fueled by our desperate consumption of the

very heart, blood, bones and flesh of this planet.

If we don't find some way to stop this train soon,

we're going to reach the end of the line.

So what do you see when you wake up

on the train? I can tell you what I saw.

I saw the ground beneath the pavement,

the man behind the curtain, the monster

under the bed, the real below the ralls.

The culture of Empire works every

moment of every day to distract my attention,

like a magician using sleight-of-hand.

What happens when I look where

the conjurer does not want me to look?

I see the trick.

I see the reality behind the illusion.

I see, if I look long enough,

that the Empire has no clothes.

Ride with me a while.

Look more closely at the train, and the tracks,

and the terrain through which we're speeding.

If we are to respond effectively, we'll need a

clear understanding of the whole of the situation.

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