I was going to title this essay “Catastrophe Fatigue,” but then I discovered that I already had an essay with that title, written about five years ago (vide: Catastrophe.htm).  It just goes on getting worse and worse all the time.  

     When I started my website, over forty years ago, I was an advocate for the Trees, contending that the only hope for the survival of life on earth was to restore the vital tree cover over the land.  I put that concept into context by publishing my ideas of philosophy, eventually working up an entire metaphysics that attempted to describe and explain the world we live in.  But, for many years now, the accelerating collapse of civilization and the physical destruction of the fragile biosphere of our planet has caused an ever narrowing focus onto the extraordinary plight of our planet as it tries to survive in the face of inexpressible horrors and ongoing catastrophes.  

     There is so much appalling madness on every hand that it is depressing and useless to offer any catalog of ongoing threats to the survival of life on earth.  If you haven’t seen the daily onslaught of news about wars going on in Ukraine and Palestine and Sudan, with rumors of war all over the planet, from Iran and Syria to Yemen and China, then you must have your head in the sand, or are deliberately avoiding the news as just too distressing to deal with.  “Deal with ?”  How can we possibly “deal with” any of this ?  And all of this is on top of climate change induced tropical storms, forest fires, pandemics, ocean necrosis, and the encroaching madness of despair.  

     Putin’s pointless and stupid invasion of Ukraine is being increasingly upstaged by the unspeakable genocide going on in Palestine, where the State of Israel has been waging a relentless war of annihilation and conquest of the Palestinian people for over 77 years, in order to completely displace the Palestinians from their land.  Fatuous statements like that of Kamala Harris, who said that the conflict in Palestine “all started with the attack of October 7th by Hamas,” as if the previous seventy-five years of oppression, gradually ratcheting up to manifest genocide, never happened, are uninformed or deliberately misleading.  

     I call Putin’s war “pointless and stupid” because even if all of his goals were to be realized, with large parts of Ukraine absorbed into the darkness of Russia, what would he have gained, and at what cost ?  As for costs, there is the enormous financial cost of maintaining a constant war footing, fielding thousands of soldiers (plus so many more, after the early waves of soldiers are killed off), with additional costs of sanctions eroding Russia’s economy, plus all the lives lost, Russian as well as Ukrainian, whose costs can not be measured along side of mere financial costs.  Then there is the erosion of Russia’s moral standing in the world, as most of the world reacts with disgust and revulsion against Putin’s war games.  Finally there is Russia’s security concerns, with a greatly fortified and unified NATO facing off against Russia’s brutality, with no end to any of this in sight.  

     Against all of these costs, of what value would a few more acres of land be to Russia, which already has a larger land mass than any other country ?  The parts of Ukraine that Russia might rejoice in its conquest are being devasted to a degree approaching the total rubble of Gaza, and Russia’s suzerainty over the land would be resented by a people thoroughly hostile to Russia forevermore.  Ukraine is Putin’s version of a snuff film.  I have a picture in my mind of a mentally enfeebled Putin sitting in the midst of a devastated Ukraine, mindlessly masturbating with the vacuous pleasure of the totally depraved and perverted.  

     But, speaking of the rubble of Gaza, how is it that the unspeakable horror of genocide be allowed to continue, day after day, without letup ?  I have already written off the State of Israel as hopelessly lost into the chaos of madness, like a maniac for whom there is no recourse left but the strait jacket, but how is it possible that the rest of the world is able to look the other way, if not actively to participate in the criminal behavior of the Israelis ?

     Of course, most of the world is not looking away, at all.  Those nations actively supporting Israel in its campaign of genocide are narrowing down to the United States and Germany, countries whose own histories of genocide are so egregious that what goes on in Palestine is nothing new to them.  Germany’s history of genocide is too well known to require any refreshment of memory, but the United States also has considerable blood on its hands from the utter destruction and degradation of the Native Americans, who were there first (in a situation entirely analogous to the situation in Palestine), plus the ongoing treatment of the Black and Brown populations, which, if the Donald had his way, would all be expelled from the United States in a grand frenzy of ethnic cleansing.  Perhaps he might ship all the Black and Brown Americans, citizens or not, to Libya or El Salvadore ?  Or perhaps he could relocate them all to the Sinai desert ?  Perhaps he could enlist the help of his crony Elon Musk to blast them all off to start a colony on the dark side of the moon (saving colonies on Mars for White people) ?

     So, to answer these questions, I submit, as I have said before, that the cause of all of these problems is the collapse of Consciousness world-wide, caused ultimately by the destruction of the Trees, with the resulting collapse of a habitable biosphere.  As the planet becomes less and less hospitable to the human race, the consciousness of people declines to levels not seen in 1000 years.  This means that haranguing against the evils of the world will have no effect on people inured to the increasingly primitive consciousness of savage beasts like Netanyahu and Putin.  

     The only hope there is left of salvaging some remnant of life on this God-forsaken planet [of course, this might be interpreted as the human race forsaking God as well as the other way around] is to work towards a renaissance of consciousness, perhaps accelerated by mass ingestion of LSD.  This is a perfectly serious suggestion !  LSD has been famously responsible for eliciting dramatic upward spikes in consciousness, including experiences of Cosmic Consciousness, the Presence of God, and the Love and Reverence for all Life.  Otherwise, the traditional spiritual practices of meditation and the pursuit of higher spiritual attainment are just woefully too slow to offer the kind of instant transformations of consciousness that represent the only chance of turning this planet around in time to stave off the final dystopian end that many visionaries have seen coming for many years now.