It's like 1914 outside because the Guns of August rage in the distance.

Sixty times across sixty years, I have experienced the coming and going of summer. Things aren't right this summer but they haven't been right for a long time. It isn't nostalgia or getting on in years that makes the heat in July 2024 off-putting. It's fucked up and more abnormal than even last summer's dystopian climate shifts.

Photo by Aldward Castillo on Unsplash

Once not so long ago July eased into a humid August languorously. It was a few weeks where people lazed and lounged empty of worries or if they had anxieties; they were calmed by the rocking of a hammock strung between two trees near a lake.

You can't avoid worry in 2024. It's like 1914 outside because the Guns of August rage in the distance. Moments ago, news wires on X reported that Israel had bombed a suburb of Beirut in Lebanon. Odds are this will spark a regional war. Is this the trip wire that pushes everything from a local war into a global conflict because the diplomatic relationship between Russia, China and us disintegrated? There are no adults left in the rooms of government.

It's not just the merchants of death we must contend with. Up close to our noses is the stench of poverty from the never-ending cost of living crisis that eats away at our sense of well-being. Centrists keep selling their politics as hope for the near future despite poisoning our present. They act as if they were peddlers of elixirs at a fairground with a potion to ease the pain of rheumatism.

I hope Trump loses, which means Kamala Harris must win. But it makes me nauseous the way people have turned a person complicit in genocide into a politician who will change America and the world for the better. She won't. But she will kill many people just not people like us.

Doomerism is a white noise that buzzes irritably in the background of our consciousness as if it were a fly banging into a ceiling lampshade of a motel room. Yet well-paid commentators whose liberalism only extends to top-income earners lecture us that negativity is nihilism and a gateway to fascism. It isn't. To suggest so- is gaslighting. The entitled and the better-paid of this era are the authors of our probable pathetic end. They are more self-serving and cynical than the entitled during the dying days of the Roman Empire.

Over the last 365 days, the unspooling of the West post-World War Two consensus quickened and the end of what Boomers likened to "civilisation" is possible.

Our governments and news media normalised the ongoing genocide against Palestinians and demonised those who protested against it. Climate collapse sped up as the globe continued to set unprecedented temperature increases and heat records. The question is when not if this planet becomes unliveable for most inhabitants, who aren't top income earners in under a decade.

Trump is the existential threat to democracy and everything else is "Shit happens".

Canada's news media and governments frame the current forest fires in Jasper, Alberta as an apolitical event rather than the consequences of the ideology of neoliberalism that drives the politics of the West towards the cliff's edge.

We lost- the ability to understand existence is finite and mortality is forever.

Capitalism conditioned us to deny what we see before our eyes because it upsets the smooth running of our economy that the wealthy indoctrinated us to believe is more fragile than our ecosystem. Rachel Reeves yesterday in her economic statement began the ground work to entrench austerity as a permanent state of governing.

Neoliberalism made us all co-conspirators to lesser or greater evils by making us either work for or be reliant on giant oligarchic corporations.

Technological advancement is not societal progress. But too many believe the one denotes the other making incrementalism a viable neoliberal political platform when it is more the 1% asking you to trust them with your destiny.

Our earth is in palliative care, and the ones to blame are not you or me because we are merely replaceable cogs in the machinery that profits the entitled. It’s the 1%, the politicians who serve them and the news media that enables their message of “Don’t worry be happy.” The thing is, you can not be happy. You must stop being happy or even attempting to pursue happiness outside of love and friendship because if you don't do something now to stop the Climate Emergency, the lives of your children and grandchildren will be brutish and short. It’s time to get angry and not be bought off with slogans of "net zero" or "sustainable" because capitalism as we know it is unstainable for our survival as a species. Just Stop Oil understands this. But for their trouble gets banged in jail as if their protest against our environmental destruction was a knife attack against a senior citizen.

For me, rent day approaches like the headlights from a truck with an unsteady load on its trailer. It leaves me stuck in the middle of the road, transfixed by it, or perhaps I am too tired to react this time and jump out of its way. But I am scrambling to keep myself housed for August. It’s a few hundred Canadian.

A yearly subscription will cover much of next month’s rent because I need only 4 to make it for August. But with 48 hours to go, it is getting tight. There is also a 20% discount here.

Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co-morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost-of-living crisis times. So you can join with a paid subscription, which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it's all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John