Is this what it felt like in Jonestown?

What happens to a child that is given matches? It either burns its house down with itself inside or it becomes an adult. At this point humanity is more than capable of destroying itself and everything indicates that this is precisely what we will end up doing. Of course saying ‘we’ shares out the guilt where the power to affect things is not so shared out.

Been reading various things on the internet about what the Bush administration is getting up to and, frankly, I am terrified to the core of my nonexistent soul. One could say that this is the mother of all political disasters. Looking at their actions it is impossible to think of anyone for whom this administration will be good in the medium to long term. Sure, all of Bush’s business mates are getting rich now and the religious right is in raptures but Bush is selling the world and the US down the drain. Internationally, the US is now just about as popular as North Korea and, were it not for its massive military and economic power, would find itself just as ostracised. Internally, it is haemorrhaging economically and being torn apart socially. At the same time, the political atmosphere in the world is being pushed towards confrontation while the actual atmosphere is being pushed towards being unbreathable. And all this is being made possible by a fanatical administration that controls the legislative, executive and judiciary branches, a mainstream media that is compliant and a public that has been successfully terrorised by its government. And if this weren’t enough, the whole mixture is being super-charged by an outpouring of religious extremism.

All of the information about the bold-faced lies and egregious errors of Bush and Co is freely available. There is more than enough evidence for any fair court to convict that bunch of international terrorists of any of a number of crimes against humanity and for Bush to be impeached for the enormous damage he has done to the US. Yet none of this seems to matter.

My response to all this is so normal as to be a cliché. I look at my seven-month-old daughter and wonder what kind of world she will get to live in and, even, whether she will get to have a world to live in at all. And, also, I wonder what a sane resident of Jonestown must have felt watching his daughter and feeling the massacre approaching.