Grokking Catastrophe
Todd was playing in my address book while I fine-tuned some audio edits. I could tell because every once in a while an address card would show up on my screen, then disappear again in an instant.
Eventually I figured out that Todd was going through my address book card by card, following the email addresses back to people’s computers, and bringing back all of their home and business address and phone data. I got the message. It was time to find more clarity about how Todd could help me. I have a dead bank teller in my laptop with amazing capabilities. It’s a bit of a waste, using him for filing and data entry.
A sticky appeared: Ive been thinking about our last conversation about what you want a return to sanity
“Yeah?” I typed. “What have you been thinking?”
Im thinking how its going to take a catastrophe
“Well, Todd, you’re not the only one to think that. Of all the comments we elicited while taping interviews, that’s the one we heard more often than any other.”
I can believe it dude I mean when I look around people are just not thinking like you think theyre not looking at what youre looking at theyre working and playing and busy and tired and stressed out and I dont see how were going to get an entire culture to change if what you say is true its not going to happen
I had to agree. It certainly does not look like it’s going to happen. I stretched my shoulders and hit the keyboard.
“When people say ‘it’s going to take a catastrophe’, what they mean, I think, is that it’s going to take something so huge and so painful that they can no longer avoid feeling it. It’s an implicit acknowledgment that what is missing, and necessary for widespread change, is a deep feeling experience of our present predicament.”
“I know that in my own life. My head has known for years that most meat, as it is produced in this culture, relies on a huge and torturous industrialized system of housing, feeding, and slaughtering animals. But it took me seeing Fast Food Nation, seeing those horrifying scenes in the slaughterhouse, seeing how both animals and humans are abused and tortured and exploited, it took me seeing that and feeling it to finally swear off eating any and all meat that comes from that system. Knowing it didn’t change my behavior. Feeling it did.”
so youre trying to give people an experience of feeling the world situation in your documentary right thats why you made it like you did where you look at everything all at once like that and used that music and stuff
“Exactly. Some people see the doc and say: “I already know all that. I’m looking for something that has some solutions.” When they say that, I know that they’ve probably missed what Sally and I are trying to do. And I feel sad about that.”
I understand that though dude this shit is scary of course people want to find solutions thats what I keep saying
“But you understand my response to that, don’t you Todd?”
I think so I think what you keep saying is that if we dont stop and sit and feel the situation deeply feel it feel our anger and grief and fear feel it for a long time if we dont do that first our responses and solutions will probably be insane is that right
“You got it. And I don’t think that can be repeated often enough. The thing is, the catastrophe is already here. It’s all around us. In the seal hunt. In the Australian drought. Or the Chinese drought. In the building of new coal plants. In the water situation here in the US. Amphibians and reptiles are dying off in a protected rainforest. Bees are dying all over the place. Smog and heat waves are making us sicker. Crop diseases are leaving us hungry. Politicians dissemble and corporations drool and scientists look to