3 Feb 2009
Hot Weather Rant #1
Over the last several weeks, Melbournites have watched in sweaty horror as public transport facilities, utilities and traffic infrastructure collapsed under temperatures in excess of forty degrees celcius.
By day three, I was convinced that the apocolypse was upon us. The air was filled with the whining cocophony of a hundred car alarms, traffic lights in the area had ceased to function and water geysers (well, a singular geyser) were/was shooting twenty feet into the air.
To use a metaphor: The shit is hitting the fan…only the fan isn’t working because the transformers have frakking exploded and the faucet is drawing dust. So get used to the smell, because you’re going to be wearing that lovely eau de merde until your local water supply authority gets back to you in seven to ten working days.
Now, I’m not looking to do an Al Gore…but between robot apocolypses, zombie outbreaks and the ever present threat of the Canadian Military - global warming is gearing up. This is not a suprise. Global warming is no more of a ninja than Aretha Franklin skipping about in a frakking pink leotard. So tell me, where’s the foresight?
It’d be somewhere under the profit and loss reports.
Privatization over the last fifty years has resulted in a blatant neglect of infrastructure planning and development. Just as there is no profit in making an action figure that is resilient enough to last five minutes in the hands of a five-year-old, the Boomers have apparently rallied together to decide there’s no profit in building a functioning societal infrastructure for their children’s children.
Now, in an Austin Powers-esque standing-in-front-of-a-steam-roller fashion, our generation plays the indiscrimante henchman screaming in anticipation of our squishy fate.
We can continue standing there like gaping idiots. Or we could just step slightly to the left.
Which brings me to today where our robot overlord Kevin Rudd’s released his second economic revitalisation package (affectionately known as ERP II: The Bloodening). Consequent to the US’s Wall Street bailout (an experiment proving that financial bailouts in a Free Market is just as effective as throwing tax payers money into a wishing well and hoping that it all goes away), K. Rudd jumps on the Yes-We-Can wagon, joining hands with Obama in the long overdue admission that capitalism as it turns out, is a fail.
“The time has come, off the back of the current crisis, to proclaim that the great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed, that the emperor has no clothes,”
Can I get a ‘hell yeah’?
The capitalist experiment is coming to an end. Now it is up to us to expediate the realisation of a new model.
It starts at home. Instead of letting your friends buy a Simonds behemoth out past Cranbourne, (for non-locals, this would be a designer home out in the scum-burbs) feeding a lust for wealth and encumbrancing yourself under a mortgage for the rest of your meatlife - try something different.
Rally your friends and become Cabbage Patch Revolutionaries. Seek an alternative commune/research lifestyle with your local ecoThinkTank. Hell, join the Venus Project for all I care.
But I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit aghast and watch society fall apart before I’m able to get to freaking Mars.
