Pause Before Chaos

A little pause for backyard barbecues and fireworks before the oncoming chaos.  The Rabid Right has closed down the Minnesota government, forced a budget balanced on the backs of the poor, mentally ill, students and the middle class in California and in other states, while threatening to bring down the American economy for an even Greater Recession and pursuing a reactionary and anti-democratic social and political agenda, all to please a rabid minority and the greed of their corporate masters.

And that's before the real chaos begins--no NFL football.  Not even NBA basketball.

It is also amidst signs of the future that are happening now: the biggest wildfire in New Mexico history, the flood waters lapping at the edge of a Nebraska nuclear power plant, and the realities the media misses or passes over--the ongoing trauma of shattered lives in Joplin and Tuscaloosa, and all the other flooded and burned out communities.  Or the lonely rooms where the elderly may quietly die in a heat wave this weekend.  The places all over the world that are in turmoil because of drought and higher food prices, depleted fishing waters and barren lands: the Climate Crisis future.

So it's worth also pausing in the patriotic holiday to ask where America is.  Because something extreme is happening all around us.  The news from places like Kansas and Wisconsin is just astonishing.  And Washington--where climate crisis denialists hold a convention to celebrate their suicidal notions.  And a nation is held hostage to extremists, despite what polls say about how very unpopular they and their ideas now are.  We should be preparing for the future by recognizing the significance of what is happening now, but we're mired in this reactionary mud.  Somehow it seems the Founding Fathers would see this clearly.

It's a national mind clouded by fear--that denies the future it really suspects is coming but which it refuses to face-- but we can be more specific than that.  This unrecognized fear is being repressed, which makes what explodes out of the unconscious all the more powerful.  In  addition to the personal unconscious and the personal shadow discussed in the recent Climate Inside posts, Jung posited a collective unconscious, which contains a collective shadow.  There sleeps the tendencies that can drive our lives, which Jung called archetypes.  Often we recognize these forces in the form of mythic figures.

I don't know enough psychology or mythology to suggest which archetypes may be possessing these people now, but one figure does come to mind from the Beatles' Yellow Submarine movie.  It's the Vacuum Monster, who simple vacuums up everything it comes upon, until towards the end of the sequence (a six minute section you can see on YouTube here), it consumes the entire world and finally (seeing its own tail move) it consumes itself.