Because the universe seems to love irony, on a post in which I talk about the advancing state of breakdown in our culture, the fact that nothing works, the emailed message was somehow linked to an older post and NONE of the social media messaging went out. So here it is… again… hopefully…
Apologies…
The Flower Moon goes dark at 8:38am today. Tomorrow the Strawberry Moon is new. The season of Midsummer is here. This is when the Green World shifts from germinating and sprouting into growth and procreation, meaning weeds and flowers. In the garden most of the tasks are centered on keeping the unwanteds from overwhelming the garden plants. In the woods, hedges and edge spaces, all the critters and birds are tending to their young. Some spring-born are already fledging and weening off mother’s milk. In my garden, the catbirds and chickadees are molting, the fox kits are starting to wander away from the den, and the rodents are eating Every Last Thing. The robins are still mating, however, or maybe working on round two. In any case, I have a few late blossoms singing their love songs in the dawn and dusk hours. I love gardening to robin song — though I could do without the vampiric bug swarms that come out in the purple light.
Today, we are facing the massive sunspot again. If you missed the last aurora borealis in not so boreal locations a few weeks ago, you have another chance tonight. Actually, it was probably best very early this morning. I wouldn’t know. After weeks of dry weather, we have cloud cover again. In fact, it might actually rain. I watered the garden, carrying about 36 gallons of water across the road on Tuesday evening. So, of course, it started raining on Wednesday morning. I’m not complaining. Well… hauling water only to have the sky dump more within twelve hours was annoying, but we really need the moisture. Maybe I’ll leave a window open tomorrow. That should be good for a solid downpour. I can always drive up to New Brunswick in late September for the northern lights. (And really good food and music…)
Or maybe not… I am none too sanguine about using my electric car in the cold these days. Road tripping might not be in my cards. Not that I ever was much of a traveler… But we are squarely in the days of nothing works as billed, and I think that sounds like a recipe for getting stranded in the taiga.
And on nothing works… The other day I received an email from Netflix telling me that my Apple TV was too old and that they would be “sunsetting” that device (such a nice way to be rude). I will concede that the Apple TV thing is old for an electrical gadget, but that’s because it works. I have never had one problem with it. (Now, the bloody remote that came with it… but anyway…) Why would I get another one? The answer is, I won’t. I sent off a nastigram to Netflix customer service telling them that I had no intention of buying a new device and turning my perfectly functional one into toxic trash and that I would sooner sunset Netflix than change my mind. They have not responded. I expect that I will soon have no Netflix. But then it’s not like I use it more than maybe a dozen times a year. Not exactly a need there. But I am in the minority. How many people are now trashing their old-but-perfectly-usable devices on a Netflix whim? And why is this necessary?
I suspect that one reason is because the old devices don’t allow for that neat new thing Netflix is doing — tracking where you are watching so that you can’t share an account. Apple may be a pain in the butt these days, but they are still the best at privacy. Combined with a decent firewall and ad blockers, Apple devices are virtually cloaked — which simply enrages all those data farmers trying to sell you and your spending habits to… well, truthfully, I don’t know who is buying all this data farm produce, but still, it’s a hot commodity. Witness the stresses of using the Mac-standard browser, Safari, on most social media platforms. Facebook will hardly talk to me anymore… not that I care. WordPress finally relented after I ran a Safari update, but it’s still clunky. AllPoetry keeps telling me I need to get a “safer browser” or take a hike — which is where I am heading now that they are allowing AI “poetry” (meaning, “bizarre word salad”).
I am a sucker for “how to save the world” stories, but these days… I can’t help but think that the best way to save the world would be to just stop sabotaging ourselves. I mean really! What is the point of tossing an internet receiver? Who benefits? Almost nobody! Probably not even Netflix because they probably aren’t going to wrench any more money out of their viewers in locking down the sharing leak. Those who want to share and now can’t will just leave. There is nothing essential about Netflix that will compel them to tolerate stricter rules which result in higher individual costs. And if I know this, then Netflix surely knows this as well. So why? Self-harm.
Yesterday, I was checking my town’s message board on Facebook — one of two reasons I still use that platform, the other being my mom — and there was a tearful post from a neighbor saying that some jerk had stolen her tomato cages. Yes, the little wire frames that hold tomatoes out of the mud. That which you can make out of sticks for free. But even if you buy them, they cost less than a six-pack of bad beer. What kind of people are we that we take tomato cages from our neighbors now? We are people who are continually shooting ourselves in the feet. And who benefits from this rise of assholery? Well… nobody. Not really. We’re a culture of profitless self-harm.
Here’s the issue from another angle. I am not an anti-vaxer in any sense. But you do gotta wonder at the logic behind vaccines that make you feel like crap, that have not been well-tested, that do very little to prevent the onset of the disease, and nothing at all to eliminate it. The vaccine only serves to moderate the symptoms enough to keep us on our feet, so that we can go back to work even as the infection rages. Who benefits from that? The drug companies, yes, but also the economic machine itself, this culture. The vaccine is not how we keep ourselves from getting sick, it’s how we keep spending money and doing labor while we are sick. It is how this culture keeps chugging along even while it causes this sickness to spread. Self-harm… that benefits very few actual people. So why?
My thyroid problems are another example. Who benefits from thyroid treatments? Yes, I am alive and upright, but through the standard treatment process, I now no longer have a thyroid and am bodily dependent on a drug that I can’t make myself, that is not even made in this country anymore (because most of our drug manufacturing now happens in India where brain power and tech labor are both dirt cheap). Who benefits from that treatment? The drug manufacturers and top tier management of same get a few more dollars, I suppose. But I have to take this drug or die. And if this whole system falls apart, I will not have access to this drug that I have to take… or die… this is no little stress, and so I have been asking from the start — “Why aren’t we doing anything to fix the problem?” Because that is not what thyroid treatment is doing.
In fact, there is not one actual curing treatment for any autoimmune disease. All of it is a regimen of managing symptoms. None of it does anything about the flooding of our veins with confused antibodies. Nobody even tries to do anything about the malfunctioning immune system. The kicker is: the medical industry is actually a chief cause of the increasing prevalence of autoimmune diseases with its practices of tamping down the body’s immune response and its utter dependence on toxic plastics and even worse materials. Like radioactive iodine to melt the thyroid when it malfunctions.
But have you noticed that almost nothing actually does cure disease? Not just autoimmune disorders, but all sorts of disease. We manage the symptoms of our culture of self-harm. We cure nothing. Because nothing can cure dis-ease in this culture. This culture is predicated on causing dis-ease, from exhaustion and depression to the welter of necessary poisons we marinate within every day. Dis-ease is the point of this culture. Illness and stress are not side-effects for a few; this is what this culture does to the whole world. When functioning as it is supposed to, this culture of modernity causes harm — and there is no medical cure for modernity. To the contrary, the medical industry is one of modernity’s pillars, the one thing we think we’ve done well… But the medical industry is more focused on propping up industry generally than it is with removing the roots of industrial illness. Because that would undermine itself. It is one of the roots. If the cure is to stop causing the disease, then it can’t cure the disease, because the only way it can stop causing the disease is to stop being what it is. To cease to exist. To not be. To die. And it will not do that.
You can’t fix the master’s problems with the master’s tools.
The cure my body needs is extraction from this culture. That is the cure your body needs as well. And do not think you are healthy within this culture of self-harm. Even if your medical profile is stellar, you are stewing your body in stress, and that stress will manifest. Some of you will feel fine until you hit forty and fall dead at an “unexpected” stroke. Some of you will exist until you are 90 and never feel for one moment the calm joy that is our birthright and the normal daily experience for living beings not impacted by our culture. When you die after never having lived, your stressed body’s internal organs will be so compromised after decades of depression and anxiety and outright harm, your organ donor card will be meaningless.
I’m sorry I rather went off the rails there, but it all makes me so mad. Why do we do this to ourselves? For money? Which is what? NOTHING! All this self-harm for nothing.
I suppose it is crumbling. That nothing works is evidence of that. That Netflix is desperately trying to milk revenue from a static market is evidence. That the best we are offered when ill is a temporary patch to keep us on our feet is evidence. But mostly, there are just more and more people all the time — tomato cage thieves, notwithstanding — who are sick and tired of it all and who are recognizing that there is no cure within this system. That the system is the illness. And we are leaving. We are not replacing our Apple TV devices so Netflix can make a few more dollars. We are not going to work sick. We are not blindly accepting the abuse and “carrying on”. We are walking away.
And the garden is where I tend to walk to… to the world of molting catbirds and lovelorn robins and flowers and weeds and purple dusk filled with little vampires on the wing. Even the groundhog. That’s my cure.
And for the record, I offered assistance and some wire mesh to make tomato cages… because that too, being a good neighbor, is part of the cure.
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 
I agree that the medical and pharmaceutical industries–that they are industries is the tip off right there–have no interest in actually curing anyone. All they want is to make money off of peoples’ illness created by themselves and by the toxic stew of chemicals from other industries that no one anywhere on this planet can escape.
My cable internet company is currently trying to get us to upgrade our modem which is working perfectly fine because they say a new one will provide us with faster internet speeds. I’m not sure why I need faster internet speeds since it all is fast enough already. So we have been resisting.
It baffles me why anyone would steal tomato cages.
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