Our Confusion

For quite some time I was worried about the coming economic problems. Here in Canada we have built suburbs over our best farm lands. So once oil gets to expensive , food transportation would inflate prices. Especially since so may of our rail tracks have been removed in favor of less efficient big transport rigs burning gas and congesting our roads. But one day I saw a documentary on how Cuba was dealing with the loss of Russian oil and petroleum by products, especially fertilizers. Brilliantly as all capable human beings they planted gardens everywhere and coped with the problem. Latter on I saw how Argentineans where trying to deal with a tragic economic collapse. People who once worked steadily and owned homes, were out on the streets surviving any way they could. Quite similar to how the Great Depression was taught to us in school. Not a pleasant situation at all. Yet I have known many people who weathered the Great Depression and are here to tell us about it. Perhaps we are to accustomed to an attitude which believes it knows abject poverty but really mistakes it for being poor. In the west, what we arrogantly call the first world. We go to work to earn money not so much to eat but rather to acquire and to consume manufactured products. We must learn to redefine what it means to be at the actual bottom of the barrel. I think that our especially North American idea of the bottom of the barrel is most likely mid way up the barrel or quite near the top for the truly poor, starving nations of the world. A dumpster here would be fought over tooth and nail in one of these nations. Of late we (our taxes) paid to throw Afghanistan back into an actually medieval type dark age. Causing great dependence on us for food. We are the masters of manipulation. we destroy a nation then cause them to beg us for the bare minimum to survive. If we want to see what an actual social collapse looks like we need only look to that nation. Ruled by Warlords, perhaps not so much medieval but rather an ancient tribal structure. But that also has some semblance of order, not our acceptable form of it but certainly not complete chaos. The western world is to damn wealthy to have a clue as to what the rest of the world is going through. So I don't worry to much about Canada anymore or our other brethren of the wealthy western shroud, but it is no wonder that the whole world wants in. We are jaded and obscenely ignorant.