Raise the Hammer

I enjoyed this book - particularly the last chapter about "Living in the Long Emergency".

I do believe many people have been looking for something that can break the patterns. There is an insanity in long-lens shots of LA freeways at rush hour, the fiat monitary system, the contrasts measured by money, and now cameras on poles watching you and laws piled on other laws akin to a medicine to offset side effects of another. Life doesn't feel as we think it should.

Then along comes Peak oil together with a serious change in the works regarding dollar hegemony. What lies ahead is the potential to level the playing field, collapse the Federal Reserve, end the ugliness of China-Marts, and just maybe provide the vehicle to take America back - a rather exciting thought, notwithstanding the difficulties in the transition. There does seem to be a feeling that a better world will emerge on the other side - a chance to start over - productive toward the simple needs of life rather than the massive consumption and debt - and a more benevolent world where people matter regardless of balance sheets. It gives pause to consider what is really important, and a way out of the things that are not.

In that regard, this book is alarmist only in expressing our current situation, rather than of the future. It subconsciously embraces the idea that at last we just may find hope ahead to break out of a clearly unsustainable path. Not only is the consumption unsustainable, but more the human spirit was never suited to the debt and loss of liberty that results from it. In a blink of the evolutionary eye, we went from being hunters and gatherers to obligated and fearful pawns in a game played by a very few who print the money - just outrageous.

Kunstler's book alarmist? I feel it is more like a tranquilizer.