They Told Whatever Lies Were Needed To Keep Everyone Passive.

 The Apocalyptic Cost of Losing Trust.

Fossil fuels are an addiction. Like a heroin addiction most of the global population are hooked on. Think of the oil industry as pushers, pimps, dealers. They have profited handsomely from your addiction. Their job is to keep this addiction going. In 2022 we have half the planet burning, and half drowning, and it’s going to get worse. There is no time for rehab, we have to go cold turkey. It’s going to be tough. Laying real hardship (which will come whether we act against climate change or not) over hyper-inflation, mass-surveillance, existing feelings of social isolation, pointless jobs, free-floating anxiety and frustration, is pretty much a make or break situation for humanity.

 

We have poor choices. Many would prefer to ‘die like heroes rather than die like sheep’. Those are words stolen from the Warsaw ghetto, when it was already too late to change the trajectory of the Nazi genocide. If we act now against the rush of climate change we might salvage something other than cockroaches for the living world. If we do not act now, then we die like sheep and take every living thing with us.

 

To act, we need the catalyst of good leadership. There is none. We have been told lies, half-truths and omissions by politicians, by the corporate media, by the church, and even by science, where our proud institutions have subsumed their treasured independent thought beneath the pursuit of funding. This easily gives credence to well-crafted conspiracy theories and the rise of charlatans with their empty promises. In this cacophony of useless noise we are missing the leadership we need. For example: Truss or Sunak? Biden or Trump? A false choice based on elementary salesmanship. Do you prefer the shoes in blue, or maybe the yellow ones? The only important thing is that you buy the shoes. In the case of western leaders, it is only important that you buy the false solutions of neo-liberal ideology.

 

Meanwhile the private armies grow. Their unaccountability hidden. Fascism peers from under the covers and judges the time is almost right. Well trained militia, armed and ready, lurk in every country. White supremacy regains new strength and neo-nazism readies itself across the world. Coups against democratically elected governments abound. Refugees desperately cross the world and climate change is weaponized. Democracy slips out of our hands.

 

I believe there is a way out. We can keep on the present course of inevitable destruction, view ourselves as a biochemical machine that has to be entertained, dumbed down, kept in the perpetual anxiety of debt and technological surveillance, or can we reach out and find our truth in the beautiful language of nature. The first choice is the ‘do nothing’ option. We stay as sheep and are herded into oblivion. The second choice will uplift us. It does not guarantee we will win, but if we lose, we will have lived the truth and die as heroes.

Poetic Symmetry

 

There is something visceral and exciting when your second book is fully published, and copies are sent out into the world to live a life of their own. I love it when they find their way back to me in feedback and reviews.

This second book of mine continues the themes of human rights and climate change which are so close to my heart. I researched the real journeys children and young people have made over the high Himalayas to escape persecution, and some of their stories are in this book, which I have dedicated to the monks and nuns of Tibet.

Alongside this journey are the climactic events foreseen by climate scientists as London floods irretrievably. The story moves from 1968 to 2030. It is fast and exciting as a lively young woman peels herself away from a thankless job in advertising and enters a world she never knew existed. In many ways this is the beginning of her story of self-discovery and awakening.

This is part 1 of a Trilogy - The Symmetries. Part 2 is on it's way, and Part 3 is in the birth canal ( so to speak).