Concerns About Our Future
I met a guy today who does cyber security for dozens of military bases around the U.S.
Considering his career, I didn’t expect him to bring up his belief that the president of the United States is making horrible, unhinged decisions on our nation’s behalf. He’s especially concerned about the destruction of relationships with our allies, claiming that the stability of the free world is at stake.
He believes, and I hadn’t had this thought myself, that certain single-issue voters really don’t have a choice when it comes to voting. “Suppose your top issue is that you’re vehemently anti-abortion. You can’t vote Democrat, so you have to vote Republican even though you know that 99% of the rest of their policies are based purely on utter stupidity.”
IMO, this is a novel way of looking at the devastation of democracy in the U.S. and elsewhere around the globe, though I doubt it’s the controlling factor. In this case, the SCOTUS Dobbs decision allows states to do whatever they like re: abortion.
In any case, most of us are worried about our country’s future, and for good reason.
My grim, sole, and final consolation is that the Epstein class have no escape to anyplace better than this planet … a planet on which they now facilitate the ruination of what we’ve chosen to call “civilization” – and even of human habitability.
They’ve preferred a few years of personal power and opulence, at the cost of the future potential of our universal peaceful prosperity, and even the survival of our species.
For all our technology and understanding, we are all still utterly dependent on sufficient potable freshwater, a reasonably stable range of temperature and windspeed, periodic and moderate rainfall, the contribution of oxygen from the oceans’ phytoplankton, and a thin layer of viable topsoil.
Our present path lays all of these to waste, and the asset managers and insurance firms know it.
Our present socio-political-economic
systems poison and use up the most basic foundations of all life.
Just as one example, water isn’t a choice people can make. It’s crucial to life, and – even more precious, and far less plentiful – drinkable freshwater is a resource without which each one of us would die in three days’ time.
In the 2025-2026 season, the western US snowpack that feeds the Colorado River is 10 to 30% of normal. On that river, Lake Powell is about 24% of capacity, and Lake Mead is about 26% of capacity). Lake Mead is now less than 150 feet above zero outflow.
As a result, Hoover Dam reduced its hydroelectric generation to 40 to 50% of its power in 2000, the last year it was full. Due to a prolonged drought and declining water levels in Lake Mead, the Bureau of Reclamation reported that generation has already dropped by roughly 30%.
As of October 2026 Lake Mead is now at 1,037 ft. If Lake Mead falls below an elevation of 1,035 feet, 12 of the dam’s 17 older turbines would have to shut down because they cannot operate efficiently in low-water conditions, slashing capacity by up to 70%.
Newer wide-head turbines have been installed to help mitigate some of these losses, but all power generation would stop completely if the water level drops to around 950 feet, and the dam would stop functioning entirely (“dead pool”) at 895 feet.
Farmers on land across seven states the river irrigates are seeing water allocations in single digit percentages of normal.
One particular living person has seen more of the world and of nature than any other human in the history of our species, and one starkly accurate quote puts it all in perspective…
“96% of the mass of mammals on our planet today are us, and the livestock that we’ve domesticated. Only 4% is everything else – from elephants to badgers, tigers to bats. 70% of all birds are now domesticated poultry, mostly chickens. Nature once determined how we survive. Now we determine how nature survives.”
~ David Attenborough
April 2019
These blindly wasteful and toxic systems of ours must change, or all our miseries will deepen quickly and exponentially. We need a way of life that prioritizes the well-being of all people AND all the natural services and web of wildlife that our survival depends on.
Solutions:
• Living wages, rent controls, and strengthened retirement protections
• ‘Tax-paid only’ systems for elections, transit, healthcare, K-12 and universities
• Hard limits on wealth and power
• Family planning education, and voluntary contraception, to cut world population
• Less meat, to free up ranch land for rewilding, to allow biodiversity to recover
• Protection for fish nurseries and spawning grounds
• A rapid shift away from toxic fossil fuels, to proven and cheaper sunlight and wind
For many reasons, time grows short. We must stand up and speak out – while we still can.
Minneapolis reminds us of the way to resist… 50,000 in a city of 430,000, showing up with:
• Truth
• Teamwork
• Non-violence
• Non-compliance
• Communication
• Humor
• Direct Action
• Perseverance.
These eight factors alone won’t be enough, but each one will always be indispensable.
Peaceful not Passive… We’ve seen that our opposition is now cruelly prepared and brutally eager to kill and maim. If we resort to weapons of war ourselves, it will lead to our own demise.
The history of movements like our suffragettes, our factory, retail, and farm labor, our civil rights, our LGBTQ+ pride, and independence in India, the government reset in Nepal, and the students in France, is all quite instructive.
We are the people we’ve been waiting for. If not now, then when?
We must each do what we can, with what we have, where we are. Watch, work, learn, teach.
Don’t. Give. Up.
Wow. Brilliant. On behalf of all our readers, let me thank you.