Saturday, November 30, 2019

A Deadly Winter in Our Future?


Do you have enough provisions in your home to live without assistance for SIXTY DAYS?

EEUU de la opulencia al suplicio (The U.S. from Opulence to Torment) is a book of prophecies printed in Colombia, self-published by Jairo Hernando Rojas Galvis (which is obvious given the occasional typo, even to someone like me who speaks Spanish as a second language.)  The introduction, foreword, and first few chapters mostly speak about the author’s encounters with shamanism and extraordinary spiritual journeys.  The author encounters a Master (Maestro) during his spiritual journey, who takes him to a crystalline library where diamond shelves hold multitudes of volumes over everything that’s ever happened in the universe. The Master takes a book off a shelf, pages through the volume, and talks about what life on Earth has really been about, how prophecies affect the future, and the rest of the book is about the U.S. in prophecies from 1998 to 2048.

My main interest in this book is in the first insurmountable disaster to happen to the U.S., a devastating and deadly blizzard that engulfs the land so hard, with snow up to the rafters, that all travel activity in wide areas of the U.S. is grounded completely.  The author moves in spirit form from the crystal library to the new scene of the disaster.  It’s actually a rather poetic text, and I have taken few liberties with the translation:

From Chapter Five: “The Portals, Locks, and Dikes Are Breaking”

From one moment to the next, all that great, majestic and brilliant building disappears before me, remaining trapped in a great tunnel where I move, at great velocity, converting myself into a sudden projectile.

I see everything is revolving, around me.  Sharply, that image disappears, finding me located in a house, located in what seems to be a large town.  From the beginning, my attitude is of bewilderment and astonishment.  I make the effort to order my thoughts, trying to familiarize myself with the images that I see all around.  I observe, through the windows, that winter has been impressively rough.  The sky is gray and the air feels heavy.  The snow is falling on the rooftops, the streets and the fields.  Later, it crystalizes, turning slippery.  And, as if I had been aware, all this time, of the grave situation, I know that the people don’t want to leave from their homes.  The heating units don’t stand up to the density of the air.  I find myself inside the house, with four more people that, I suppose, form the family group.  They look anguished, through the blurry windows, at what is happening outside.

Their fearful faces reflect an indescribable fear, before the approach of an imminent tragedy.

Every once in a while, they lift their gazes toward the ceiling, since this creaks from the unsustainable weight of the snow.

And they don’t dare to leave.  In the streets, the situation is much more critical.  It appears to be a ghost town, whipped by a strange blizzard, that howls pitifully, with those howls loaded with deep, poignant omens.

Food gets scarce.  It’s necessary to bear, during sixty long days, the pitiful circumstances that have extended, in an inclement way, to several states in the south of the country.  There’s no transport, because to leave represents a risk, even more, when vehicles can’t move, since many find themselves trapped below the snow.  This phenomenon had been seen, year after year, but never so intensely.  Neither had anyone paid attention (to it), thinking that, with the passage of the years, the situation would improve.

There’s no air traffic.  Airports are found closed, interrupting, thus, the transport of passengers between cities, same as the exchanges of food.

They say that there are lots of bodies of homeless people, scattered through the streets, that sleep the deep dream of death, hidden under the great banks of snow, that reach up to three and four meters of height (10-13 feet).

One cannot see dogs, nor cats, walking around the white streets.  Pipes are stuck.  Water for domestic use is found frozen.  Radio and television signals are seen permanently interrupted.  Panic and anxiety have gone invading, slowly, the terrorized inhabitants.  Facing the threat of a famine and facing the great decrease of food reserves, the supermarkets have been seen sacked.

Many of those who left their houses have not returned. The insurmountable harassing difficulties presented by the weather, have made death surprise them on the road. Not even crawling is it easy to travel.  The air appears to freeze, even in the smallest corner of the lungs.  For the body, it’s difficult to maintain normal temperature, and contact with the snow produces burns.

One cannot see the least hope for a change in the situation.  Pretty well, forecasts are discouraging, considering that they tend to prolong themselves for a length of time still undefined.

Around me, I only see four twitching faces that preferably fall silent, in order to not let escape their countless phrases of regrets.

I stay in the corner of the small living room observing them, finding myself conscious of the fact that I am an entity far away from them, at the precise instant of the living events.

The father, a robust man of fifty years, short on hair and eyebrows, walks from one side to the other, trying to maintain the temperature of his body and, at the same time, hide his restlessness.  He has on his mind a dominant thought that shakes him over and over again.  He wants to leave in search of food.  He heats the palms of his hands with his breath, time and again. Later he tells the others that he wants to leave at all cost.  His son, his daughter, and his wife beg him, by means of poignant tears, that he not do it.  And they remind him that, at each moment, is repeated in the bulletins: “Don’t leave, because the people who have disappeared are uncountable.”

He turns to the pantry, opens it and, sadly, it shows its empty interior.  Rations have been exhausted, despite, in the latter days, they used a can to distribute between the four (one can for four people). And this situation is generalized for the majority of the families.

A bulletin informs that hospitals are living in a critical situation.  People sick with pneumonia, the cold, and starvation have been going up in a disproportional way.  Personnel to attend them are very scarce and, at the same time, the reserves of food and medications are approaching their end.

The greater reality is that the government has been seen impotent to be able to send aid to different states, since the atmospheric conditions don’t allow the flight of airplanes or helicopters.

The block is total.

Here, in this home, the situation is desperate.  The father busily seeks the way to convince the family that he should go out in search of provisions.  His son, a young man of some 19 years, offers to leave with him, so that it can happen.

The mother begs that they can still last a few more days, with the hope that, from one moment to the next, the situation will improve.  He responds that, if the opposite occurs, the four would be in grave danger of dying.

The roof of the house keeps creaking, menacingly.

After a short discussion between them all, father and son decide to go in search of food, knowing, before hand, that all that is no more than a risky adventure, where they are putting the existence of the two in danger.

There is only one site they can leave from and it’s a narrow window that is found located under the stairs that go up to the second floor.  As soon as they open it, a frozen wind begins to enter, brusquely beating against their faces.

The main door is completely stuck by the snow, that covers it more than three quarters of its height.
The two women embrace, getting confused in the middle of a touching sob, as if, inside them, throbbed the bleak omen that they would not see them again.

After going through the window, due to the narrowness, the father gets caught by it, initiating a distressing struggle where everyone helped him, pushing him by his legs until, finally, he‘s face down on top of the inclement snow.  Later, the son passes through with light difficulty, blizzard whipping in his face, with overflowing fury.

They close the window forcefully, stopping, inside, the whistling of the wind.  Some small mounds of snow stay stuck to the frame.

Through the tarnished windowpanes, they watch them getting further away, panting, through the snow, like two ghostly figures that go fading away heavily, after a white, dense mist.

I decide to leave behind them, because I don’t have the inconvenience given to material forms to move around, although I feel the mild influence of the elements of nature.

On the road is found, every great once in a while, a passerby transformed in a vertical snow man, animated with slow movements like that of a polar bear.

Half-hidden, under level mounds, parts of extremities are peeking out, rigid and cold, like an iceberg of ice.

I continue behind them, like an inseparable shadow.

They roam, like a boat adrift, looking for some store.  They only find broken windows and empty shelves.  Many flammable objects have served to light some bonfire, on a corner, and thus to heat up the body of the beggars and those who still had not been able to return to their homes.

Cars are seen under the snow, like laconic monuments, the ones that, for a short while, were an effective mode of transport.

While Peter is walking – I heard that name from the lips of his wife – he remembers the days when he would work as the driver of a forklift.  The business is found inactive and the forklifts stayed stacked 
up, like a mountain of scrap.

In his fifty years, he never saw anything like it.  And he had not been without work.  His two children couldn’t return to studies. Everything is found paralyzed, save for a few scarce activities that, hardly, can stand up, under rigorous sacrifices.

Through their minds, the darkest thought didn’t pour about being part of these bitter circumstances.  They had been used to seeing everything, like passing facts, like the average of the majority had seen them, too.  In the brutal winters, there had always been abundant machinery to clear off the highways.

The runways of the airports were always kept clear. The supermarkets had sufficient supply.  Gas wasn’t lacking and heaters, bad or good, always worked.  Now, things had changed.  Survival hasn’t been easy.  They are very few who haven’t experienced a hidden fear facing the grave situation.

Peter and his son walk embracing each other, to give themselves mutual heat.  In the meantime, they observe that their breathing is made more and more difficult, and in their thoracic cavity, they feel like their lungs are trying to explode.  Their nostrils, upon contacting the air, give the sensation of 
being rummaged around by a burning blight.

The visibility, in certain moments, becomes almost nil.  Without being night time, a tenuous darkness invades the streets like a sinister shadow.  They haven’t managed to find anything.

The act of walking under these painful conditions has subtracted the little energy they still had from them.  His son, due to his youth, walks on, not without feeling a certain discouragement that goes up, like an icy snake, through his legs.

They have wandered during several hours, fruitlessly.  They say that, until they don’t find anything, they won’t return home.

But the hands on the clock keep marking the minutes, and these seem eternal.  Being interminable, they have become hours that shake their fatigued bodies.

The majority of cities of some states in the south, especially the small cities, live in similar situations.  It’s like if the forces of nature had been conjured, in order to cover, with their extensive arms, these regions.  Man has seen himself incapable of fighting, observing that his distressed efforts haven’t been spent to be unsuccessful.

The night’s shadows have extended their wings, like a gigantic antediluvian monster, that sharply shakes the air, with the rise and fall of its vigorous wings.

One way or another, also for Peter and his son, everything has turned dark and quiet as a tomb, after several worthless hours of walking. Conquered by fatigue and cold, lying down against each other, they allow themselves to collapse under the threshold of a door of a sacked store.

They woke up, amid regrets, in a large room of a hospital.  The majority of the hospitalized people cry out, in screams, for their family members.  They don’t let them leave because conditions don’t allow them to and they would be exposed to a certain death.

Meanwhile, the wife of Peter and their daughter, after three days of waiting, try to leave, in a useless search.  All of a sudden, everything is confusion.  The two women die smashed by the roof of the house, that yielded to the weight of its load.  They weren’t the only ones that endured this tragedy.  Uncountable households remained buried under the snow.

Several days have passed.  The snow melts and, with unused force, in the middle of a fierce bellow, overflows impressively, supported by unexpected storms.  The houses appear to be small boats that float, sliding, impetuously, over the surface of the earth.  Human remains are dragged, by the violent vortex, showing on their faces the indecipherable grimace of anguish.  Household appliances are part of the fury of the flow.

Peter is left with only his son and his pain.  He has lost everything he fought for in his life: his family, his household, and the vehicle that, in other times, served him as efficient transport.
At the site where his house had been, they found only sticks where it had stood.  Not a sign of his wife or daughter.

Across various states, only desolation is seen, mud and vestiges of what there was once upon a time.  Unburied bodies and the smell of orphanhood.  Even then, the survivors don’t recover from their anguish, of the ire and the desperation.

The help of the government converts itself into alms that remind them, with nostalgia, of moments of ephemeral happiness.

There was no dam or sluice that would stop the rumbling passage of the water, in its unforgivable eagerness to destroy.

The drowned cries, in gargantuan tears, are happening everywhere, driven by the howling of the wind.

The victims are countless, the same with the economic losses, being considered this episode one of the greatest national tragedies.

 --- End of Translation ---

Now, I'm not one to scaremonger people into doing anything, but these past couple of years of 'polar vortexes' and suchlike have made me really apprehensive about what the worst winter storm of all would be like.  I daresay anyone who manages to survive sixty days without other human contact will be lucky if they haven't prepared beforehand.  Since it's just me and hubby, I'm sure we could manage well enough, especially since we have lots of 'stores' in the form of fat and could survive a minor famine with no problem.

However, if there are an uncountable multitude of homes and bodies washing away in the floods at the end of the blizzard, what comes next?  Who is going to be working the farms, for example, providing the next season's worth of food?  Who is going to be building the roads that have been gouged away by floods and floating houses, or clearing or even staffing the airports?  

In preparation for this future, it won't be enough to stock food items in your house.  You'll have to stock information to pick up jobs that'll need to get done because the population has been decimated.  You might have to work in a hospital, for example, or you might have to clear brush and debris from schools or roads or even train tracks and airplane runways.  You might be lucky enough to have been a Boy Scout or a Girl Scout and can spread your skills to anyone you meet.  You certainly can't assume your 'old job' will be around!

And, according to other parts of this book, we will have to go through this without any help from other countries.  I fear the majority of the world's countries are alienated enough by our current administration, so they would undoubtedly find excuses not to help. 

In the United States, it's considered admirable to 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps'.  Unfortunately, that may be mandatory in this frigid future.  I'll be praying for us all to survive, but if circumstances take a turn for the worst, it's been great knowing you all.  I hope to see you on the other side...!





Sunday, July 28, 2019

Sarcasm: the Death of Language

What is sarcasm?  For me, sarcasm is saying what you don't mean, but in such a way as to mock what someone else thinks is true.

That's where we get it wrong.  I'm of the opinion that, when you say something, it should be true, and you should mean it.  Otherwise, it's a lie.  And lies are the death of language.

What's the purpose of language, anyway?  To communicate, right?  Well, if you lie, that means you're communicating that which is false, that which is not representing reality.  If you get a reputation as a liar, then no one can trust what you say to be true.

Lies are so pervasive in the world today that it's hard to tell truth from fiction.  Even the most constant and blatant lies of someone who sits in the Oval Office are destroying our collective ability to communicate with each other!  If you can't tell what's true and what's false, how can you decide what to think about any situation?  Whose word can you take for truth?

That's why so many people nowadays say things like, "Follow the money," or, "Actions speak louder than words."  We've been socialized to be verbal creatures; surely your parents oohed and aahed over your first word.  Once we get into school, the overwhelming majority of our education is verbal.  If you have upright citizens as parents, you got in trouble if you were caught lying.

And that's also a major issue: IF you get caught in a lie.  Used to be you would get in trouble, but nowadays so many people shrug it off, even among their friends, that it's just another piece of information you collate with the rest: Shelly lies about her age, or Debra lies about her boyfriends, or Dave lies his drinking, and so forth.

Nowadays, people lie to get what they want, and they don't think twice about it because what matters is what they can get people to DO.  "Hey, I'm homeless, do you have any change?"  "I was on the interstate when I had a flat on the way to work...."  "My uncle Bob died last night, and I need Friday off for the funeral."  Employers are about the only people who check up on such statements, and if you lie, that's it, you're fired.  Unless you're a state worker; supervisors have to follow progressive disciplinary actions and have levels of suspensions before the employee can be dismissed.

Back to sarcasm, the 'funny' way to lie.  Sarcasm is the height of wit, it seems, and I'm seeing and hearing it more and more.  To me, it's just another way to lie, and it's especially bad when it's the written word instead of the spoken word.  If spoken, you can at least use vocal inflections to indicate that it's supposed to be a sarcastic statement.  But, if it's written, unless you have some type of indication or symbol indicating sarcasm (such as, '$he think$ he'$ hot'), the point is that SOME people will misinterpret the intent of your statement, either out of stupidity or innocence if not willful perversion.

And that means communication is lost.  You have directly subverted another person's attempt to understand reality.  We might as well all be deaf and have no language at all; that way, you're forced to acknowledge someone's actions as 'reality'.

I was on Facebook the other day, and probably half of the posts that weren't videos were laden with sarcasm.  I often point out how un-funny it is, how counterproductive or how ineffectual it is, but no one seems to care.  We live in such a constant sea of misinformation and propaganda and scorn that it's a wonder any of us can get through a day without second-guessing someone's intent or meaning.

Imagine trying to learn another language when all the people are lying to you.  Can you say you've learned that language if you try to order a hamburger and get fried chicken?  What do you do when you realize you can't trust anyone at all to tell you the truth?

Stop the sarcasm, please.  Next time you're tempted to spout something sarcastic, think it over and say what you mean, instead.  I can assure you it'll be more powerful because of its truth.  If we can't get everyone to speak the truth, we might as well give up speech for good.