Why am I so delighted about this? Because lately I've been extremely pessimistic about the signs I'm seeing everywhere regarding what is gonna happen next for the human race -- and not just to Oakland street gangs. To me the freaking future has been looking really bleak. There seems no way that we can avoid another world-wide Great Depression. The dollar is in a tailspin. According to Chuck Butler at Kitco's Dailly Pfennig, banks across the world are now struggling with negative balance sheets. "Here's the roster of writedowns this week, and this week alone... HSBC $3.4 billion, Bank of America $3.3 billion, Bear Stearns $1.2 billion, and Barclays $2.7 billion... UBS is rumored to announce a $7 billion writedown, when they do get around to announcing..."
And one of my hipper friends just informed me, "I heard that Brazilian supermodel Gisele has refused to get paid in dollars and is insisting on getting paid in euros instead." That's scary. "And in his new rap video, Jay-Z is flashing a large stack of euros instead of a large stack of dollars." Okay. The dollar is going down. Depression is on its way and it won't be the kind that you can just medicate with Prozac. Got that.
We also now have a leader in the White House whose only goal in life apparently is to make himself the world's first trillionaire at the taxpayers' expense and to blow up as many people as possible in the process. Will he blow up you and me too? Follow his pattern so far. Logically, the answer to that one is "Yes".
Healthwise? OMG. Don't even get me started on that one. And I'm not just talking about sucky insurance plans either. I'm talking about plagues and radiation poisoning and stuff like that. Bad stuff. Let's change the subject.
And did I already mention war? There'll be lots of war in the future. Wars on every continent. Wars on every block. Good grief! The shoot-out has once again become our dispute-resolution tool of choice. And it will only get worse.
And no oil. Everyone knows there will soon be no oil. That's a given. And pollution and global warming competing with global cooling. "The Earth is hurtling toward a warmer climate at a quickening pace," according to a recent Nobel-Prize-winning U.N. report that warned of "inevitable human suffering and the threat of extinction for some species." And the seas rise and weather becomes totally freaky and the carbon rate in the air gets higher than it's safe to breathe and we're all be just riding bicycles -- if we're lucky. Whew!
Madam Jane predicts that there are a million ways that the human race, both collectively and individually, are gonna be in Big Trouble in the next few decades. "But Jane, is there any GOOD news?" Yeah sure. According to a book I'm reading right now, microbes will be able to survive. Did you know that there are microbes that can live in nuclear waste, seven miles under water and in the vents of volcanoes? No matter what happens to humans in the the future, at least we know that MICROBES are good to go.
"But Jane, will the human race be totally wiped out?"
Surprisingly no. Like what will happen to the gang members of Oakland, there WILL be loses -- but not all of us will be Going Down. Madam Jane makes the following prediction: "Somehow a lot of us will somehow manage to get through all of this chaos in one piece." How? I don't know. And what will life be like for us humans in a decade or two? More than likely, things will be just horrible -- Americans living like aborigines or cavemen while dreaming of Paradise Lost. But what's my point? Some of us will still be alive.
And where there's life there's hope.
