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 technofixes. Look at my inbox, Todd. I can’t keep up with the news of catastrophe.”

so why arent most people feeling it already

“You don’t have to look very far to see the cultural forces at work that keep people dumbed down, numbed out, distracted, disconnected and deeply in denial. That’s why catastrophe seems necessary. We need a two-by-four upside our heads to feel the destruction going on around us in the world. It has to hit us hard, and right in our own back yards, or we don’t feel it. Of course, when we wait for a huge and painful catastrophe to hit our own backyards, we’ve pretty much waited until it’s far too late.”

“Even though many people sense that deep feeling is what we need in order to change, most of them will fight those deep feelings tooth-and-nail. Because it’s so scary. Because the pain is so great, the grief so deep, the fear so fierce, the anger so hot. And because most of us do not have close relationships and communities and tribes to help us hold that pain and process it and survive it. Alone, on our own, it’s too much. So we tamp it down and go about our destruction as if everything is fine. Or we move right into action without fully facing into and grokking the situation.”

grokking

“It’s a term Robert Heinlein used in Stranger in a Strange Land to indicate a deep understanding and feeling of something, a deep knowing that goes far beyond intellect and reason.”

I looked through your old emails dude you sent out thousands of articles and essays about this shit you were trying to get people to feel werent you

“Yep. The information is important. We need to understand what is going on. But just as important to me was that people start to feel the enormity of the situation, and the inevitability of population crash and cultural collapse. Without both understanding and feeling, we’re bound to just make things worse.”

“I’m going to put a title card at the beginning of the doc. Something like: This documentary is long and dense. Don’t try to understand it all the first time through. Let it wash over you. And just let yourself feel it.”

thats a good idea

“Well, it was Sally’s idea, but thanks.”

so what was your catastrophe

I leaned back and thought for a bit before responding. “That’s a good question. One thing Sally and I have noticed as we’ve worked on the doc is how many of the people who are able to look clearly at the situation have had hard and traumatic lives. As if their early experiences loosened them up from the culture, as if their investment in the way things are was broken up and fell away, such that they could see the culture for what it is: a system of abuse and exploitation and destruction and control masquerading as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Those people have had their catastrophe.”

“I never went through that type of overt trauma. For me, it was a slow process of awakening. I remember reading about the ozone hole back in the late 80s. It scared the hell out of me. And I had little kids then. I started reading and thinking and learning. I saw forests cut and subdivisions and strip malls built in their place. I read of climate change and oil depletion. I read of the sufferings of animals and birds, of fishes and bees and rivers and the land itself. My catastrophe came in bits and pieces, and slowly I learned to feel it.”

“I found a comment on my old report card from kindergarten: Timmy did excellent work this year. It was a pleasure to teach him. He is very sensitive and we’ve been working to overcome this, as school will be a happier experience if we solve the problem. That was my catastrophe. Luckily the correction failed.”

so we all need our own catastrophe but some people need one thing and some people need something else and your documentary is trying to like create that catastrophe for people and whack them upside the head with so much information and feeling and stuff that it breaks through their denial and wakes them up so theyll change is that right

“Yeah. That’s a good way of saying it. Some people won’t be ready for that. But some will. The doc is for those who are ready to be moved.”

its kinda the same thing the chicken did for me

An idea hit me. “Todd, I’ve heard that there’s a correlation between the severity of people’s experiences of abuse and other trauma and their awareness of cultural and environmental issues. But I have no idea if that’s actually been studied and reported on. Maybe you could find something on that.”

Todd posted a yellow sticky of joy and excitement: cool dude my first real assignment Ill get right on it I think I know some good places to look but wait let me finish filling in your address book ok

Todd was off. And now, so am I. Back to work.

I wish I could send Todd for pizza.