OK, so I've wasted a year of my life on the blogs.  And a little.  From this sad and fruvious abandonment, I've come to a sharply diminished sense of my own importance, a contradictory tendency towards arrogant and conceited assertion, and a great solidity in my belief that most people — myself included — are purely batshit.  However, I've also come to a few questions, which I toss out to the members of our invisible college for rumination, digestion, and perhaps (finally) deposit, messy or neat as per your nature.  To whit:

It is very easy, in the day to day, for any kind of hope for a livable world to slip away.  It’s hardly necessary to reiterate the reasons in a progressive forum, but they bear repeating if only as an introduction to my arguments.  At the top is population; in my lifetime the world’s population has doubled, and resources have not kept pace.  Thirty five thousand people or so die every day from starvation and it’s consequences.  While we live in the global west, a step removed from the face of this horror, the results of shrinking resources and ecological catastrophe are not far behind us.  In this context, Americans – and perhaps eventually Europeans, Canadians and Australians as well – are facing a future of desperate and reactionary governments, the diminishment of liberty, and lives increasingly circumscribed by expectations of conformity and loss of privacy.  In America especially, we have seen the rise of a government dedicated to permanent war and the promulgation of fear, hatred and vengeance as guiding values and, indeed, policy.