"ALERT: Active shooter situation... this is not a drill."

The woman hurried through the door and fumbled it shut behind her, face tightening.

She said: there's a man with a gun in the building. The police say we have to lock the door and not let anyone in. She added: shots have been fired, one person hit, possibly killed.

Minutes later, an emergency text message from the university came through on my phone: "Active shooter situation at UNMH (University of New Mexico Hospital). All Central and North Campus personnel should lockdown until further notice.  Male suspect with small silver handgun." The university web page repeated the message, adding: "This is not a drill."

At the time, I didn't find any reassurance in the phrase "small silver handgun." Instead, my mind honed in on the words "active shooter" and "lockdown." And on the first word-of-mouth accounts: man with gun, running wild in this very building, one person shot and possibly dead.

Before too much time had passed, it became clear that the initial word-of-mouth was ludicrously wrong. The shooter was never in our building. No one had been shot at all. Only a single, random shot had been fired by a stupid, confused man who got in a shouting match with his girlfriend, then ran away.

It all ended anticlimactically with an "all clear" message. Back to the routine.

For a few minutes, though, before anybody really knew anything, I found myself locked in an underground room -- a training facility for doctors to practice on simulated patients -- with strangers who believed, as I did, that we might be in the middle of the next Columbine or Virginia Tech.

After the woman came through the door warning of an armed maniac looking for blood, I grabbed an L-shaped metal machine part of some kind from a nearby table. Trying to imagine myself smashing it into the gunman's skull. Trying.

A random thought interrupted my surreal vision: this will be all over CNN. My parents will find out about it that way. Unless I call them.

This was my second day back at work in the New Year, 2011.

* * * * *

An autumn night, a decade before. My girlfriend was so angry she was shaking. Angry at me.

No, no, no, she spat, not looking at me. It's never justified. Never.

Days earlier, we'd sat together for hours watching television coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks. By late afternoon on that day, after seeing countless replays of the planes impacting and the towers collapsing and the Pentagon burning, in an endless surreal loop of video catastrophe, we couldn't take it anymore. We went to grab a burger at an empty greasy spoon restaurant.

A couple sat down in the booth next to us. I overheard a fragment of their conversation. The woman hissed venom from her mouth: we should kill every fucking one of them, she said. No question on that day of who she meant and why.

That evening I stood with my girlfriend at a peace vigil, joining hands with others by candlelight in the haven of the local Unitarian church. The reverend acknowledged that she had no words. But still she asked of the empty quiet presence in that place: let us have peace.

Days passed. The President spoke to Congress and promised vengeance. And that right soon. Before the attacks I had nothing but contempt for the tiny little rodent man from Texas. But I watched him promise retribution and I felt my teeth coming together in satisfaction. Yes. The people who did this have to pay. We know who they are and where they are. And we're coming.

News reports spoke of United States military forces moving into position, bearing down on Afghanistan. Fleets converging on the north Indian Ocean. American troops and supplies moving by rail across the territory of the vanished Soviet empire, toward the mountains and valleys that once claimed so many Soviet dead. The U.S. Secretary of State delivered an ultimatum to the government of Pakistan: cooperate in the coming war, or we're coming for you, too. The leadership of Pakistan bowed.

I greeted the news with approval. My girlfriend did not. We shouldn't go to war, she said.

Well, then, I replied, what should we do?

I don't know. Not war.

They killed 3,000 Americans, I said. We know where they are and if we don't destroy them they'll do it again.

Her reply: eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Just because it was done to us doesn't make it right for us to do it back.

Incredulous me: are you insane?

She was shaking. So angry I thought her face would split open. She said: you have no idea what violence is.

Incredulous me: I don't care. The people who did this have to pay. Getting rid of them is also legitimate self defense. We have every right to protect ourselves.

Her: no, no, no. It's never justified. Never. You wouldn't talk like that if it had been done to you.

Me: Done to you? Like what?

Her: Like being raped.

* * * * *

You have no idea what violence is.

My girlfriend spoke a foreign language. (A) She had been raped; therefore (B) U.S. military action against Afghanistan was wrong. It took me years to understand the logic and experience connecting A and B.

When the American war in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, I thought of foreign policy mostly as a cerebral game of strategy. You know, like Risk or chess. Sure, it had ethical and emotional components, to be hashed out in seminars and panel discussions, along with calculations of ends and means, budgets and doctrines, national interest and geopolitical stability.

As a good socialist, I was generally skeptical of U.S. military interventions and favored big reductions in the defense budget. Funding domestic social programs over expensive global military commitments was, to me, good public policy and the right thing to do. Using U.S. military forces to kill people was almost always a bad idea. Except, I always hastened to add, in truly exceptional circumstances.

Like Pearl Harbor. And Auschwitz. And September 11. In catastrophic circumstances like that, it seemed to me, every community of human beings reserves to itself the right of self-defense. Because the nature of the threat leaves no choice other than war. That means killing other human beings, systematically and deliberately, for as long as it takes. Until the threat is removed. It's a horrible thing, I thought, but sometimes unavoidable.

That's the way I thought in the years leading up to September 11. And in the immediate aftermath. Back then I occasionally wrote earnest, measured essays, contemplating the tragic necessity of deadly violence to defend national well-being. The use of military force was just one instrument in the game, and the game was about concepts more than people. The concepts were rendered in the antiseptic language of what C. Wright Mills once called the power elite. The people who run this planet. Presidents, generals, ministers, propagandists, technocrats, executives. When they speak of September 11 and the ensuing war on terror, their language invokes stability, international systems, asymmetric threats, nation-building, counter-insurgency, geopolitics, and the like.

To the woman I slept with on the night of September 11, foreign policy meant something very different. Something that made her muscles tighten and her blood turn to fire and her voice shake with rage.

You have no idea what violence is.

* * * * *

Often, when she slept, her body writhed as if being ripped apart. She whimpered and cried. When she woke up the crying wouldn't stop. Sometimes she woke in a heaving convulsion that ended with a helpless strangling wail of anguish.

By day, in a professional setting, she conducted herself with calm good humor and grace. She smiled at colleagues and when she gave an academic talk she conducted the audience like an orchestra at her command. You had to know her very well to pick up on the tightness that flashed across her face, the fleeting ghost of worry in her eyes.

At night, the professional persona crumbled to dust. She paced and fretted, her body taut, every motion rippling with the energy of accumulated tension. She talked incessantly about every detail of the day. Who said things to her in the professional arena, what was said, how it was said, the range of possible motivations behind the words, the response she gave, whether the response was effective, the range of possible hidden motivations and thoughts underlying the exchange. A never ending hyper-conscious calculus, analyzing in microscopic detail the flow of events in the previous hours. Looking for signs of something that went wrong, or might go wrong, or could conceivably go wrong. Worry seeped into her psyche like acid. Eating her away.

She lived in a constant state of near-paralyzing anxiety that she had learned, over the years, to control. Enough, at least, to get by. To pursue an extraordinarily demanding professional career. To succeed. To do more good in this world than most people will ever dream. But at night when the acid of fear and dread burned its way into her soul nothing could convince her of the success she had achieved or the good she had done or the future that lay before her. She simply ruminated in her private invisible torture chamber of anxiety, and nightmares, and tears.

In the worst hours before dawn, she saw no future at all. She talked about driving to a particular place where she would put an end to her agony for all time. She had it picked out. A nine hundred foot gorge cleaving the Earth on its descent to the Rio Grande.

Then at daybreak she woke up from it all. Her exterior chrysalis of good humor returned and she navigated the sunlight. While inside she waited for night and tears.

Sometimes the veil of agony lifted. I remember sitting with her once by the stillness of a lake in the mountains. Soon we would have to drive back to the city. I said: it will be a shame to go back to the real world. 

No, she replied, to the water and wind and silence and mountains older than time. This is the real world. Here. 

In her childhood, she was raped. Over and over and over again, for a very long time. The details aren't important. She told them to me, at great length, and I listened. It was the only way that I thought I could help. By listening. And so I did, for hours beyond count, over a period of years. To the stories of what it feels like to be a child and be raped. In the course of the telling, I gradually absorbed the emotions underlying her story, maybe because I tried so hard to feel it with her and understand. Her psyche erupted over and through and into me like a storm on the surface of the sun. Sensations in my head of what she must have seen, heard. Smelled. The stench of the men raping her. The power of muscles forcing her down. The shadows over her like demons, without mercy. Taking the soul of a child and burning it as if with hot metal, making the child scream, doing it over and over and over, no matter how much she begged them to stop. 

The child grew up with more than just memories. She carried the mutilation inside her. A spirit burned and mangled, the pain of it searing her in adulthood, even in dreams, every second of every day of her life. As surely as if someone had forced her to the ground and physically burned her face away with a blow torch while she screamed and begged them to stop.

She taught me, at least a little, of what it means to be helpless, wanting only to be loved and cared for, while your body lies at the mercy of absolute power that takes all hope of mercy away.

The child who lived through that experience became a woman and found a place for herself in the world. She was a Wiccan. She beheld living things and saw them blazing with ancient incandescent fountains of light. They were holy spirits to be worshiped and cherished. Hers had been broken when her life was new.

* * * * *

The violence my one-time lover experienced as a child broke her soul and remade it as something else.

In clinical terms, she experienced a long series of "Adverse Childhood Events." ACES, in the jargon of the mental health professions. The term, according to the research of neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and others, refers to extreme traumas inflicted during the critical period when a young human nervous system is still in flux, still being formed. These incidents of extreme violence will fundamentally reshape that child's emotional makeup and cognitive functions from what they would otherwise have been. Forever. Compared to other parts of the population, these children grow up to experience more frequent and intense episodes of anxiety and depression. As adults, they often have difficulty forming relationships. They may be prone to risky behaviors, substance abuse, and suicide. If they don't come to understand themselves and what they went through, they face higher odds than others against leading a happy life.

These effects have been observed in survivors of childhood rape, torture, imprisonment, natural disasters, and war. Those events, almost inevitably, inflict a lifetime of psychic agony on the children who survive them. The agony, in a great many cases, will lead to physical suffering, spiritual devastation, and early death.

This is what my lover meant when she spoke about the American war in Afghanistan after September 11. This is what she was thinking when she lashed back at my theoretically-informed apology for vengeance by saying: you have no idea what violence means. To her, waging a war in Afghanistan meant condemning an unknown number of children to unspeakable violence even greater than what she experienced herself. With even greater effect.

When I spoke of geopolitics and the defense of national interests, she didn't hear the language of the foreign policy elite, in which I had been trained as a graduate student long ago. No. She heard a defense of mutilation and suffering without any conceivable justification. She heard the casual dismissal of atrocities, measured not in casualty estimates but in splatters of blood and internal organs smeared across chunks of shattered rock. Measured, too, by the shuddering night time sobs of the survivors, decades after the bombing stopped.

Remembering her words today, I can't believe she ever spoke to me again.

* * * * *

If you know how to listen, you begin to understand how much violence lives alongside you, in the fabric of  everyday life. Violence, and what it does to people. Not only children, but grown men and women, too.

I know a combat veteran of the American war in Panama. He served in the Marines during that war, in the waning days of 1989. His unit helicoptered into the theater of operations in the opening hours of Operation Just Cause, assigned to seek out and destroy elements of the Panamanian military.

He told me once what it was like. Crawling silent through the jungle soaked in sweat, toward the enemy soldier up ahead in the darkness. Unsheathing a knife, pulling the man backwards off his feet. Slicing open his throat. All in a day's work. Him or me, my acquaintance said. You do what you have to. He did it a great many times.

Years later I traveled with the man and his wife. We stayed in the same room at a hotel in the desert. In the dead night air he woke up shouting, lunging to his feet in a combat crouch, moving like an animal on the hunt. I never saw him move like that before. Never heard that other voice that came from his throat, as he defended himself against phantoms. He wasn't the same person any more. When his wife moved toward him to wake him from the possession, I wondered what I could possibly do if he tried to hurt her. But it was okay. He returned to his waking self. Putting on the persona. Making it through the ensuing day. His marriage eventually disintegrated. From what I can tell, he doesn't really believe in post-traumatic stress disorder. Not for him.

Last year I sat in a conference room alone with an Iraqi physician, listening to his experiences in Baghdad during the shock and awe of 2003 and the civil war after that. In the days leading up to the U.S. attack, he and his wife stayed in the Iraqi capital even when they knew an American onslaught was coming no matter what.

The physician described what it was like when the bombs began raining from the sky and the booms shook the foundations of the Earth and the sky erupted in gigantic flashes of light. Before the bombing, he and his wife imagined they would just stay inside and ride it out. But it was so loud, he told me later. We never imagined what it would be like. The way everything shook, the way your guts sloshed and heaved with the concussions, the way the explosions made that awful godlike thundering crack, the way it just went on and on and on.

The Iraqi doctor's eyes filled with tears as he told the story. In America you watched it on television, he said, but it was different on the ground, living through it. It was so loud and it wouldn't stop and everybody was so afraid and kept screaming. The whole neighborhood and everyone in the city, millions of people, screaming in unison with every rolling slamming quaking shudder of the explosions from the jets and missiles in the sky.

This Iraqi doctor was and is a supporter of the American military presence in Iraq. But he said of that night when the bombs fell: I never heard anything like it. A whole city screaming. In the telling of it, tears came to his eyes.

You have no idea what violence is like. 

* * * * *

A few days ago, for a little while, I believed that I found myself in the midst of the next media friendly mass killing spree by the latest maniac with a gun. Behind a locked door in a room full of strangers I waited to see what would happen. I called my parents and told them I was safe. Just in case this turned out to be as horrifying as my primal Stone Age brain told me it might.

It wasn't. Not for us, in that office on that day. But for others it was, on that day and all the rest. Millions and millions of people. Some of the violence they live through is financed by my tax dollars, earnestly defended by strangers and friends. Carried out by people like the Marine who fought in Panama, against people like the doctor from Iraq. In Afghanistan and elsewhere. Day after day.

It's all justified by the best intentions and the most sophisticated logic. By the insistence, for example, that in Afghanistan we of the West must finish what we started. There is a moral obligation, it is said, and a vital strategic interest. Afghanistan must not fall to extremists. Its people must not be left at the mercy of savages who will use their country again as a base, committing new atrocities against their community and against imagined enemies far away. Against people in the United States and allied countries, governed by institutions which, despite their sins and failures, try mostly to muddle through on the way to a decent life. For their own citizens and for all nations. To the extent, at least, that human imperfections will allow.

That is how the reigning story tells it. The way I once did to a survivor of atrocities, who woke up every day wondering if she should be in the world at all. Our time together ended and we don't speak any more. Sometimes I hear about what she's up to, and I hope she's okay. Back when I knew her, I sometimes tried to tell her how much it meant to me that she told her story. How much it affected me. Or think it did. Maybe I'm not qualified to judge. Even now, I can only know the aftermath of what was done to her. And remember her story. I can't really know what it was like for her. And is.

I do know that I react differently now to justifications of state-sponsored violence. The intellectual part of me still remembers why the official stories once felt true and right. Why I repeated them and believed them in the days after September 11, 2001. Going on a decade later, I can't do that anymore. When someone writes with great earnestness of the necessary war in Afghanistan, I read the earnest defense of subjecting a child to rape. Not some idealized hypothetical child but a real woman that I woke up next to every morning, once upon a time. I read calibrated pragmatism pointing out, with due sobriety and seriousness, that as a child this woman necessarily had to be held down by force while strangers performed the exact spiritual equivalent of burning her face away with a blow torch. The strangers had no choice but to make her scream. And keep doing it to her because, after all, this had to be done, because in the real world, you see, there really is no choice. That's the official story.

To encounter such reasoning is to be told that its mechanistic atrocities will go on forever. Because they always have. This could well be true. The way of things, chronicled across all history, destined to go on forever. If so, there is nothing to be done. Except try to tell the story differently than the authorities would have it. The way it was once told to me, by a woman I once knew. I didn't understand her at first, but I decided to try. And here I am. I did have a choice after all.

The choice didn't make me a pacifist. I can still imagine necessary wars. Grieve for the warriors, like the man who went to Panama and came back hollow. Understand why he did what he did, to survive and come home. On that day when I waited for Columbine in a locked office, I all but prayed for the S.W.A.T. team to blow the shooter's skull to bits.

We live in the world where such things happen, and sometimes must. But I like to think I'm a little less delusional about what they mean. What violence and war really do, to targets and perpetrators alike.

Message from a starship

Today, we present another interlude of romantic diversion in between tidings of the apocalypse.

 V'Ger! The launch of Voyager 1

NASA's Voyager 1 probe is approaching the edge of interstellar space. In particular, NASA believes the spacecraft, launched in the Age of Disco on September 5, 1977, is almost past the immense sphere of our sun's solar wind. The sun constantly emits an outward-rushing stream of electrically charged particles, which scientists have dubbed "the solar wind."

Certain readings now being transmitted from Voyager 1 indicate the craft is nearing the point where the solar wind stops. See the press release from NASA for the nitty-gritty details. NASA is trying to refine its calculations of when the probe will actually depart from the solar wind's boundary. As of today, scientists expect that to happen in about four years. When it does, the radio telemetry from Voyager will provide confirmation. Assuming, of course, that the radio equipment is still working by then.

If it is, then Earth-based listeners will receive the first human radio signals ever transmitted from truly interstellar space, beyond the sun's farthest reach. In its own way, it will be an achievement equally as impressive as the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969.

It will be another entry in the annals of spiritually significant human achievements from the era of fossil fuels. The industrial development made possible by those fuels enabled us to see our planet from outside, and send explorers, both human and machine, to other bodies across the ocean of space.

Those same fuels will, inevitably, bring an end to the current industrial age, together with all the economic and social institutions that it made possible. Whatever rises in the future to replace this way of life will have to find better ways of living within ecological limits, on drastically reduced supplies of energy. But those future societies will be able to do so with pictures and memories from the edge of forever. For whatever that may be worth. A lot, I would say. The experience of eternity is one of the things that redeems mortal human existence.

One of my regular readers expects that our distant descendants of the new ecological age will have a sufficient resource base and technological infrastructure to resume human exploration of the stars. I hope he is right, for many reasons. Not the least of which is the necessity of finding a new home for the human race before some cosmic catastrophe wipes out the Earth.

But also, I invoke a principle once cited by a friend of mine, when he was arguing in favor of spending money to send human beings to Mars. Asked for a good reason to do it, my friend mentioned other, minor reasons, before getting to the most crucial principle. He spoke of technological spin offs, the need for interplanetary colonization to ensure human survival, the superiority of human explorers over machines in searching for extraterrestrial life, the availability of affordable technology for the trip, and so on.

But his main reason? Because it's cool, he said. Adding, helpfully: so fuck off.

May the enterprise continue.

* * * * *

Postscript: Pioneer 10 is further out into space than Voyager 1, I think, but I don't think it transmitted any signals from beyond the solar wind. Need to check that.

And a star to steer her by: Voyager 1 in flight

Day 2: There must not be blood. An American city confronts peak oil, July 2015

Duke City Commonwealth.com
Saturday, July 4, 2015
9:15 p.m. MDT

Compiled from staff and volunteer reports.

 

1: Downtown Albuquerque, July 4, 2015

22 people are known dead and at least 200 believed wounded in Albuquerque in the last 24 hours, as protesters engage in running street battles with Albuquerque police and elements of the New Mexico National Guard.Casualty estimates come from sources at Albuquerque area hospitals.

All of the dead and injured reported so far are civilians. State government sources have not released casualty figures among police and National Guard forces. Eyewitnesses claim multiple instances of police or Guard personnel being hit by gunfire from street protesters.

Sympathy street demonstrations have broken out in Santa Fe and Las Cruces, although so far the demonstrations there have been peaceful.

New Mexico Governor Susanna Martinez has declared a state of emergency in Albuquerque, effectively placing the city under martial law. By the governor's order, a 24 hour curfew went into effect in Albuquerque at 4:00 p.m. today. Persons other than police, military, or emergency services personnel found to be present outdoors will be fired upon. The Speaker of the New Mexico House of Representatives, Democrat Raymond Lujan of Grants, has vowed to challenge the governor's emergency declaration in court.

Governor Martinez refused to comment on reports that she has asked U.S. President Mitch Daniels to deploy regular army troops to the state. Pentagon sources have suggested in recent months that ongoing combat operations in Mexico, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Venezuela would leave little manpower for suppressing domestic disturbances in the continental United States.

The violence in Albuquerque began yesterday, with a clash between protesters and police at a local supermarket that left five demonstrators dead. The protest was called by community leaders in response to the mounting food crisis in the city.

Street battles in the ensuing 24 hours suggest more than anger toward the police. Signs and slogans among protesters have denounced food shortages and high prices, also accusing local supermarket chains of cronyism in food distribution.

More than a dozen supermarkets were reportedly damaged in today's fighting. The South Valley Albertsen's store where the street battles began yesterday has burned to the ground. Fire department personnel trying to respond at the scene were met with automatic weapons fire from surrounding buildings.  

Gunfire from police during the day's violence was repeatedly met in kind by local residents. Protesters used automatic weapons, Molotov cocktails, and rocks to inflict a so-far unknown number of casualties on police and National Guard forces throughout the city.

 2: New West National Bank, near Coors and Central

One report claimed that an improvised explosive device (IED) destroyed a police patrol car in the South Valley, but the report remains unverified.

A source with an Albuquerque activist organization, speaking only under a guarantee of anonymity, claimed that the violence could soon escalate dramatically. According to this source, meetings of key community members at secret locations spent the day debating a coordinated response to the violence. The meetings apparently failed to reach a consensus.

However, one group favored escalating the so far piecemeal armed attacks on police and Guard units into an all-out armed insurgency. Members of this group include several veterans of the U.S. military, with combat experience in wars spanning the last fourteen years.

One veteran is said to favor massively destructive guerrilla style attacks. These attacks would use car bombs and other techniques faced by American forces in the ongoing global U.S. war to suppress Islamic insurgents and other "assymetric" opposition.

Other activists have reportedly gone so far as proposing an alliance with the city's gangs and drug cartels. 

A larger group, according to the source in Albuquerque's increasingly underground activist community, favors a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Under their proposal, the Archbishop of Santa Fe and other religious leaders would mediate an end to the confrontation. Albuquerque residents would pledge to abandon violence, while state and city authorities would accept formal, face-to-face talks with community leaders to address the ongoing food shortage and economic crisis.

 3: Central Avenue, downtown

The source who described this proposal emphasized the growing desperation of many ordinary citizens. "We've got unemployment over twenty percent. A lot of people are running out of food, and they've got sick family members who can't get care because they got no insurance. And the government is cutting people off from all kinds of help. Medicaid, unemployment, welfare. They're closing the schools. They say there's no water rationing but the utility is cutting people off anyway. And it's a hundred fucking degrees every day. Everybody's tired of it. Something's got to give. When people are desperate they can do anything."

The source who made these remarks self-identifies as a supporter of the peace proposal being discussed by activists. The source agreed to speak about the proposal, and the more violent responses under consideration, in order to head off a worsening of the current situation.

"But the government's got to give, too," the source emphasized. "They can't keep doing this shit to people. They've got to talk to us, about ways to start helping people. Organizing neighborhoods to start living a different kind of life. Because the old days, they aren't coming back. Wal-mart and partying on payday and going to the mall. That's done. The government's got to start helping people deal with that."

The source wouldn't offer a precise prediction of what will happen next. Nor would the source speculate on how the debate in Albuquerque's underground will go. The activist only repeated the need for action amidst growing economic collapse. "If this keeps up," said the activist, "things are going to get bad. We won't be a community no more. We'll be the resistance."


* * * * *

Public domain images from Wikimedia Commons:

1: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dec2008-riot-komotini-1.jpg

2: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Commercial_Bank_(closer_shot)_(Athens_riots_December_2008).JPG

3: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thess-riot-barricade-2.JPG

UK company says the Second Age of Sail begins in 2012

British wind power company B9 Energy plans to begin manufacturing the first sail-driven cargo vessels of the energy descent era in the year the Mayan calendar turns -- 2012, the 14th b'ak'tun, marking 5,523 years since the creation of the world.

The new commercial sailing ships will be 60% wind driven, aided by an engine run on bio-fuels or liquid natural gas. So, it's not one hundred percent sail, but it's a start. The ships will carry 9,000 tons of cargo, which is about five times more than the biggest merchant vessels plying the oceans in the era of the Yankee clipper. You can read about the new ships here and here.

They will look like this:

B9 Energy's clipper ship

Not terribly elegant by the standards of the tall ships in the days of old. But it's a start. Dreams and plans are afoot for many more such vessels. Low Tech Magazine has one article describing them, as does Peak Oil blogger Dmitri Orlov.

With oil production peaking and the other fossil fuels certain to eventually follow, the return of sailing fleets in some form seems inevitable to me. Human societies five hundred years from now will trade across the ocean with ships driven by wind, by solar steam power, by biofuels, and all of the above at the same time, I'm sure. With the shift in the Earth's climate, the home ports for many of the great ships of the future will lie on the shores of northern Canada, Siberia, and Antarctica.White wilderness turned green, with cities and harbors and stories.

Just thinking about it gives me hope, for some dumb reason. Probably because I'm a shameless, hopeless goddamn romantic when it comes to sailing ships. As a kid, one of the first books I ever read was about John Paul Jones standing on the ruined deck of U.S.S. Bonhomme Richard, refusing to surrender to HMS Serapis. I used to read about American kids in the first few decades of the old Republic, running off to the docks of Boston or New York to join up with a merchant ship or the indomitable frigates of the American navy. I somehow missed the parts about "rum, sodomy, and the lash." Or told myself that only the British Navy was like that. Uh huh.

 U.S.S. Constitution in Boston harbor, October 2010

Whatever the realities, I grew up dreaming of a romantic life aboard ships like Old Ironsides, the U.S.S. Constitution, launched on October 21, 1797. She fought the French, the Barbary Pirates of North Africa, and the British, never lost a battle, and was never decommissioned, either. Constitution remains in active service today, 213 years later. 

With any luck, this humble relic of the first Age of Sail will be around for the second. There may not be a United States five hundred years from now, but I hope Constitution is still afloat. 700 years after first touching the water. Maybe the descendants of today's Americans will sail her across the Arctic to countries yet to be born. I hope it's a goodwill tour.

There are days when the future doesn't seem so bad.


* * * * *

Sea Fever

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

                                          John Masefield, 1916

They say Albuquerque is dying: an American city confronts peak oil, July 2015

Duke City Commonwealth.com 
Friday, July 3, 2015
11:55 p.m. MDT

Albuquerque police opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators outside a supermarket early this evening, killing five people and wounding at least 11 others, according to police and hospital sources.

Incidents of rioting, vandalism, and arson have erupted throughout the city following the shootings at the supermarket. At least two police officers are known dead in the city-wide violence and four others wounded, according to a police spokesman. The number of dead and injured among civilians in the hours after the supermarket clash remains unknown, but numerous eyewitness reports say police have used deadly force repeatedly throughout the evening.

Today's outbreak of mass violence was believed to be the worst civil disorder in the state since New Mexico was occupied by U.S. military forces during the Mexican War of 1846-48.

Numerous, extensive fires have been reported throughout the Albuquerque metro area, affecting commercial and residential buildings as well as vehicles. The glow from the fires was visible as far away as Los Alamos, fifty miles to the north. 

1: Downtown Albuquerque, July 3, 2015

At 10:00 p.m. this evening, Albuquerque Mayor Darren White issued a directive establishing a near-total dusk-to-dawn curfew throughout the city, effective immediately. In a written statement, the mayor officially authorized police to use deadly force at their discretion to enforce the curfew. Police and emergency services personnel are exempted from the curfew. The mayor's office and police have ordered all other city residents to stay in their homes or businesses for the duration of the curfew.

The mayor has reportedly asked New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez for National Guard assistance. Information to that effect comes from sources with the City Council who asked to remain anonymous. Eyewitness accounts of troop carriers moving south on Interstate 25 between Santa Fe and Albuquerque could not be immediately confirmed.

The demonstration and shootings which triggered violence across the city took place at the Albertsen's supermarket on Isleta Blvd SW. At about 6:00 p.m., several hundred local residents began to gather in the parking lot outside the store. South Valley community groups had called for the demonstration the previous day, in response to accusations of hoarding, price gouging, and favoritism against the store's corporate management. The crowd size soon swelled to 2,000 or more, according to eyewitnesses.

Police appeared on the scene at about 7:00 p.m. At least two dozen patrol cars and several SWAT teams were reported gathering on the fringes of the demonstration. Two police helicopters patrolled the airspace in the neighborhood as police ordered the protesters to disperse via loudspeaker. The police warnings came at about 7:15 p.m. The sound of gunshots was heard soon thereafter, according to eyewitnesses. Police and community leaders each accused the other of firing first.

Organizers of the Albertsen's protest say police opened fire indiscriminately, without provocation, pouring dozens of rounds of live fire into a dense crowd of demonstrators. "They just started shooting at anything," said Albert Romero, President of the South Valley Coalition of Neighborhood Associations.  "There was no cause for it, none at all," Romero said, his voice breaking. "These were peaceful people going hungry. What the hell are we supposed to do?"

Deputy Police Chief Joseph Vigil said in a statement to media that police were fired upon by gunmen within the crowd and "used legitimate, appropriate force to defend themselves and stabilize the situation."

Emergency room personnel at University of New Mexico Hospital confirmed five deaths by gunshot wound among victims treated at that facility. Eleven other victims of the Albertsen's violence were treated for various injuries. Four of these are said to be in critical condition. Officials at university hospital and other medical centers reported scores of additional victims as violence spread across the city. Health care providers say precise numbers of dead and wounded are impossible to estimate, owing to "the fluidity of the situation," as one hospital administrator put it. 

2: Barelas neighborhood, Albuquerque, July 3, 2015

Tonight's riot at the Albertsen's supermarket, and subsequent violence, comes amidst an acute worsening of the national economic crisis in recent weeks. Local food prices have spiked dramatically, as they have across the nation. Economists blame poor agricultural output in much of the world and the latest explosion in global oil prices. After declining to $110 per barrel late last year, oil closed today at an average price of $272 on global commodity exchanges. Gas at the pump in Albuquerque hit a new record this week, according to the American Automobile Association, averaging $9.61 per gallon.

A seemingly endless litany of national economic woes has worsened the picture. Relentlessly increasing unemployment has fueled an eruption of mass poverty unseen in the United States since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The nation's official unemployment rate stands at 19.7%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the New Mexico jobless rate reported at 22.3%. Meanwhile, draconian fiscal austerity at the local and national level has cut social services such as food stamps, Medicaid, and unemployment relief.

The crisis has exacted a grim toll in Albuquerque and around the state. Food shortages, once unthinkable, have become a fact of American life in the last year. Skyrocketing oil prices have driven up costs for fertilizers, pesticides, tractor fuel, and other petroleum-based essentials of industrial farming. Soaring transportation costs have bankrupted trucking companies and kept food from reaching supermarket shelves in sufficient quantity to keep up with demand.

Meanwhile, New Mexico's drought emergency enters its twenty fifth consecutive month. Governor Martinez has repeatedly urged voluntary residential and commercial water conservation measures, to little apparent affect. Today's high temperature of 111 degrees Fahrenheit marked the eleventh time in the last thirteen days that the temperature has broken the century mark.

So far, authorities in Washington have warned state governments to expect little in the way of federal assistance. President Mitch Daniels says other national needs must take priority, including the ongoing U.S. budget crisis and military operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Vice President Mike Huckabee, speaking at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque last week, promised that essential national security facilities in New Mexico would remain untouched by the nation's fiscal emergency.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico has called on the Daniels administration to institute food rationing and subsidies for the middle and working classes. So far, White House officials remain cool to any such move toward what a National Economic Council staffer called "failed big government policies our nation can ill afford in the present situation."

Albuquerque citizens have reacted with growing anger and frustration to food shortages at local stores. Albertsen's, in particular, has faced accusations of favoritism. Community activists say the supermarket chain continues to sell food at bulk discounts, directly from wholesale distribution centers, to corporations, government officials, and wealthy individuals. "It's outrageous and it's immoral," said Miranda Begay, a neighborhood coordinator for the Albuquerque Transition Network. Referring to Albertsen's management, Begay declared, "We've got families on the verge of starvation everywhere in this city and they're selling food at cost to people who have everything they could ever want."

Albertsen's representatives have denied those charges. They say the ongoing shortage of food staples results purely from high fuel prices and global market conditions in recent months.

An investigation by Duke City Commonwealth.com, published in a series of reports in April and May this year, documented at least five apparent instances of bulk discount sales to corporate customers by Albertsen's employees.

Mayor Darren White's office has indicated that maintaining order will be his top priority in responding to the economic emergency. "People have to know that the government's going to keep the peace," he told worshipers last Sunday at New Hope Evangelical Church in Albuquerque's Northeast Heights. "Without law there can be no liberty," the mayor declared. "And liberty is one thing we're going to keep in this hour of our country's greatest peril."

Community activists have taken a different tack, emphasizing grassroots engagement for social justice as the key to a prosperous future. Environmental, labor, and religious groups have organized an array of grassroots, non-governmental efforts for economic relief over the last three years. Governments at the city, state, and national level face bankruptcy, but local initiatives have tried their best to fill what seems a growing gap between public resources and public needs.

Albuquerque Transition Network's Melissa Begay tried to sound a note of hope about the future. "There's so much good that we could do," she said, as television coverage of this evening's violence unfolded in her Barelas area home. At an an impromptu meeting with fellow activists in her living room, Begay said, "Neighborhoods are starting to come together, to help each other. We've got teams of master gardeners teaching the basics of urban farming. We've got teachers passing on real trades and real skills that people are going to need to take care of their families. Carpentry, mechanics, you name it. We can do so much. The city could help, if they wanted to. They should be helping us instead of killing us."

Others in the community reacted to tonight's events with disbelief and despair. Only blocks away from the meeting of activists at the home of Melissa Begay, a bleeding man comforted his two children while their family-owned hardware store burned nearby. The man, who asked not to be named, said he'd been wounded by gunfire from Albuquerque police. A bloody wound to his shoulder had been patched with a makeshift bandage.

"I never seen the like," he said. "Never here, anything like this. I fought in Waziristan for this country," he said, referring to service in the Pakistan war with the United States Army. "I thought this kind of stuff only happened in other places."

Where does he think we go from here?

The man paused, watching the fire burning across the street. "They say this is the end times, you know? That maybe this is it. They say Albuquerque is dying. And the world too, you know? But if this is the way it's going to be, then maybe I don't want it all to go on, right? Maybe it's all better to just let it go."

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Public domain photos from Wikimedia Commons:

1: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:School_burn.JPG

2: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Riots_Paris_2007.jpg