The Death-Cult revisited

Now what?

Our world is the hands of small groups of unstable males.

The response to this from the males who are not quite as unstable is to stockpile nuclear weapons and increase defence spending. There are some women who agree with this or at least will go along with it. The Christian-militant-right must be thrilled because it gets us all closer to the Last Battle when Christ will return and the Saved will be… well, Saved.

Good luck with that.

When I was a child, living in End-Time, AKA the Last Days, we prepped for all this with regular drills under the stairs. Both my parents had been in WW2 so they had some idea about shelters and essentials. But it was a different world in every sense. Not globalised. Not supply-chain dependent. There was no supermarket in our town until I was in my teens. We had a coal fire and always 6 months’ supply of coal, bought in summer when it was cheap. We had an allotment. We belonged to a church. Mrs W had a war cupboard full of tins. I guess we would have survived a while. Surviving wasn’t the point though. The point was for the world to end.

Is that where we are heading?

As Trump prepares for his birthday display of military might, costing tens of millions, the important thing, perhaps the most important thing, is not to shrug off any of this as some sort of new normal that we’ll all get through. Maybe we will get through. I hope so. Meantime, keep your mind keen and your beliefs intact. Weaponising the world at this level is madness. No western democracy has a mandate for the proliferation of nuclear weapons. There is no way back from those missiles once fired. Everyone knows this. But here we are.

Remember all the right-wing rubbish before Trump got elected about how he would make the world a safer place? How’s that working out? Nobody seems to remember what they said now. Trump least of all. 24 hours, wasn’t it, Big Guy? All wars sorted?

So, I seem to have turned into Mrs Winterson. Oscar Wilde said, in The Importance of Being Earnest, ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.’

It’s witty, and more true than not. Sometimes we can’t avoid our fate, but it’s useful to have a sense of humour about it. (Note to the Death-Cult.)

What am I doing? I am prepping, in a modest way, with tins, first aid, seeds, wind-up torches and radios, some water purifiers and so on. Animal food and bird seed, because what depresses me is not the end of my life as I know it, but the creatures of this beautiful world. My garden is already an oasis filled with breeding birds, a hive of wild bees, butterflies, abundance, beauty. I have used no chemicals here for over 30 years. That can be ruined in a few hours. And for what? To start again with sticks and stones and scarcity, because you ‘won’, because you ‘lost’?

Madness.

I was flying home from Australia just now and I looked out from the window at the stars, which seemed not to be above me but all around me. Right there, just outside of the window. I could see that space is curved. It was beautiful and strange and made a nonsense of all the clamour down here on earth. They will still be there after End-Time. Everything will begin again. Somewhere. And life will return.

I have felt for a while that we would be making bigger choices soon - about whether to manage ourselves like grown-ups, or go on brawling and hating and finding excuses to destroy it all because some people don’t agree with us or worship a different sky-god. I am still optimistic that goodness can prevail.

What I do know is that we are thinking ourselves into the unthinkable. The press should take some responsibility here. The endless doomsaying is not helping. Where are the serious editorials, the TV shows, the news-specials, the influencers (FFS) telling us all to get behind the One Big Beautiful Effort? To save this planet and all her creatures, human and not, from the wish to end it all, because, you know, that’s much easier than sorting it all out.

Next week I shall write about a different kind of prepping we should do ( I think).

Potassium Iodate for contamination of the Mind. See you next Sunday.