“At the height of the uprising, people marched in Bonn, Rome, London, Tokyo, New York and dozens of other cities around the world; students in universities revolted…”
There is a danger that people will simply charge ahead unheeding, assuming that America’s economic problems will disappear, and clinging to the delusion that everything will be all right in the end since America is strong and “God is on our side.”
These costs are real and are not going away. You can’t continue to sweep them under the rug. Like your credit card bill, the costs only grow greater if you ignore them.
Peak oil, mass extinction, catastrophic climate change. With every passing day, the signs are becoming more and more difficult to deny. But we deny them anyway. We swear we’ll curb emissions. We pledge to actively pursue an alternative energy policy. We don’t believe we have a problem. We can stop anytime we want. Just not today.
What if Japan, the face of the future, is showing us who we are becoming – as a kind of proverbial ‘canary in a coal mine,’ a Cassandra of our trans-cultural futures.
When the life Sontag loved fell away and the death she feared took over, relaxation set into her body for the first time, a smile appeared on her lips and her brow unfurled.