Today I find my mind mulling over the time after oil, maybe 100 years or less from now. There are all kinds of predictions down to just a few years. Things have a way of changing, like Steven Seagal says, real fast. I'm not seeing it a dire emergency. Lord have mercy, 2/3 of the people on earth live in poverty, now. Can it get much worse? Yes. One out of eleven American adults is in prison. High percentage black, of course, as our penal system has become a network of concentration camps for black males primarily. Talk about these being great times and America is the richest country in the world. America is home to some of the richest people in the world, who bank offshore, but they don't figure as American people. They're the ones making decisions we the people live by in obedience. They're not people anymore. They're corporations.
All that as it may. We're right in the middle of the Age of Oil living with products made of oil in everything around us. Computers. Toothbrushes. The interiors of our cars. The clothes we wear are largely oil-based, like the fertilizer that makes our food grow. I look forward to the end of mega-farms producing one thing and shipping it. At a grocery store in central coastal Florida in the time when oranges were in season, the oranges in the store were from California. In the middle of Indian River country. I'll be happy to see the family or community farm come back. Maybe it's a good thing Americans love to have a plot of ground around the house to mow. Yards will make ideal places for gardens.
I can't help but see us cluster into communities when we can't drive cars any more and have to replace bridges that have fallen apart with rope foot bridges. We'll have ferries across the rivers again. We'll walk more, like in the old-time days, and we'll ride horses again. Maybe we'll return to the "Garden," get back in rhythm with the natural world that we actually do live in, that we actually are a part of. Won't it be good not to have traffic any more. No more Highway Patrol. No more car insurance. No more getting break downs repaired. No more wrecks. No more people getting burned up in automobile fires. I see us more conscious than we are now. We are way more conscious than we were a century ago. A century from now we'll perhaps have at least that much more of a boost in consciousness. Perhaps we will collectively want to live in peace. It seems like it would have to be opening to a new way of seeing all the religions we already have, the core of them the same, like pearls on a string.
Buddhists tend to live in peace among themselves and everyone else. Christendom is the crusader religion that wants to take over the world by might. Christians can't even get along with one another. Christian soldiers marching as to war. Goose stepping. This is where I have never been comfortable with Christendom, the identification with war. Victory in Jesus! God is on our side. Kill a commie for Christ. My way or the highway. Onward, with the cross of Jesus going before. I can't help but think in this summing up time that the Christian passion for killing knows no peace time. Every Christmas people sing sweet songs about Peace and send cards that say Peace. Though Peace with a peace symbol is inappropriate. It's not supposed to mean actual peace. It's just supposed to sound pretty. A good documentary on how Christendom became so violent is CONSTANTINE'S SWORD, made from the book by James Carroll of same title. It answers a lot of questions and questions you never had. By the end you feel like you understand it.
That mind in Christendom will have to be ended before we can have peace on earth. Quite a lot of Buddhists have peace on earth. Buddhists may be the most peaceable people on earth, perhaps the Tibetan Buddhists the most peaceable. They are peace itself. Seems like there will have to be some cohesive spiritual experience everyone will have in common that appeals to all of us, like Jesus did, to live in peace amongst ourselves. Sorry Jesus. It went right over the tops of our heads. What in Christendom is called the Second Coming may be what it takes. I've seen its meaning explained in a lot of possible ways, each one a way it will not be. Things like this never happen as expected. That's the only certainty. And when these matters of the spirit manifest, often it's the ones making the most noise about waiting that miss it and their religion becomes one of waiting.
The best part is we will return to living in communities, largely self-sufficient communties, like old-time small towns, farms all around, though a different kind of farming this time. More conscious farming, each area with its own cooking styles, getting variety back into living. Returning to our humanity from a couple centuries of leaving it as far as we could get. Pushing the envelope. Now, it appears we'll be progressing toward helping to heal the earth and live better. No more anti-depressants. More people playing music. Live music of several varieties per community. No more tv, giving people a chance to know each other again.
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