THE TERRIBLY BANAL TRUTH ABOUT THE CURRENT TORTURED STATE OF THE WORLD AND WHAT THAT MEANS FOR THE FUTURE

If things go on as they are
Say the politicians
Soon all will be well

If things go on as they are
Say the campaigners
Soon all will be gone

A society of wealth
Or a wealth of suffering
Thrusting t'ward the future

They lie They lie
They dramatise
The dull and heavy truth

There will be no new world
Of wealthy bright people
Making music to love to

There will be no apocalypse
No final end or reign of evil
No stop sign to the human race

The politicians in retirement
Write happy endings
To stories of power

The campaigners in despair
Make movies of darkness
With endings of terror

All lie All lie
All dramatise
The dull and undramatic

If things go on as they are
A wealthy few
With hungry hordes around
If things go on as they are
As they seem wont to do
Then things will go on as they are


Okay, I wrote this because I'm almost as tired of the apocalyptic mutterings of campaigners as I am of the tiumphalism of neo-liberalism. Left wingers and the like have been predicting a terrible end to capitalism for years. Of course now they are *convinced* it will happen because they've made predictions about how much abuse the global environment can take. Fair enough, and we'll be kind enough to ignore the predictions of the seventies that claimed we'd all be dead by now because the environment couldn't take much more. So there really *is* a limit to what the earth can take. Of course there is. But that does not mean that anything will change, that there will be some catastrophic meltdown or some fiery end. Access to natural resources has always been limited in the industrialised world. In the future it will become more limited as resources become scarcer. But nothing much will change. The rich will have more access to the resources than the poor. The poor will be poor and the rich will be rich. This is not good, but it is not an apocalypse either.
And don't mistake what I'm saying - I'm not saying change is impossible - only that if things go on as they are then things will go on as they are. Which they don't have to of course.
So why did I bother writing this? Because campaigners undermine their own credibility by constantly prophesying the end times. Wealthy Westerners find such prophecies difficult to believe - they feel too thoroughly comfortable to believe them so they just thing campaigners are unnecessarily shrill doom merchants with an overdose of conscience for the future. And I really think it is those passive critics who are more right about this. They *will* be okay, and their children will be too. It's other people who'll do the dying, just as they do now, and campaigners ought to address this terribly banal truth - that in the future the rich will do just fine, and they know it, so there's no point in trying to persuade them otherwise. Concentrate on reality rather than being melodramatic and everyone will pay a lot more attention.