Greens, Ghosts - and Fake Greens.

Goddesses just do what they want.

From about 1998-2002, I did a comic strip series, "Rental Goddess," for the magazine PanGaia. I forgot how many I'd done, because most of the pages went to San Diego State Special Collections. 

So out of the blue, the proofreader for the magazine sends me paper copies of all the strips, including the introduction of the Deity Kun-Rah, Goddess of Not putting Up With Crap. Damn, these are funny. And what timing! As soon as my lovely new friend scans 'em, I can post 'em at Webcomicsnation. 

So I guess I'd better get to the work of Not Putting Up With Crap, because Kun-Rah says so, and I don't want to meet her third ritual.

There are two futures for all of us - and I do mean all.

If you're a Green, if you really try to limit your footprint on the earth - regardless of how completely successful you may be - if you realize your position as a human on the earth, then you're going to survive, or at least the younger people around you have a better chance of survival. 

Admittedly, there will be a couple generations of misery, if any of us do make it, but we can remember who survived - and who didn't - and why. Greed will be of evil memory, and a terrible warning, the province of ghosts.

The Greeds will all be Ghosts. And your chances for making it into the future will depend on what you really do, not what you pretend to be. It doesn't matter if you're a Fake Green. A lot of Greeds are realizing it's good to come off as a Green. Why? Do they think we'll be more likely to feed them, in the coming bad days? Of course we shall - but their own shortcomings are taking out their DNA, even now.

But you can spot Fake Greens, because they don't walk the walk.

1. You may be all artsy, hippie-dippie and spiritual, but if you puff yourself up over your brother who killed a cougar, bragging how long its tail is (and how Freudian is THAT?), you're a Fake Green.

2. If the first thing out of your mouth about the end of food stamps in the US is how people in Australia showed up in sports cars to scam the system - assuming that, if a few people are butt-heads, everybody should starve - you're a Fake Green.

3. If you tell people nobody has to worry about local conditions - endangering their future - because your god told you "there would be no tsunami," you're definitely a Fake Green. And a mean one, at that.

4. You're Green, and you start "intellectual discussions" on why the 2nd Amendment can't be updated or nothin'? I think I'll just stick to the reason gunbillies are going to end up Ghosts; practicalities. I have a scary feeling they think they can get sulfur and saltpeter by just running down to the local garden store. They're all into the Frontier, but seem to forget the Frontier was the creep of civilization - and even Mountain Men had to come back in every 6 months or so to get flour, sugar, salt, coffee - and gunpowder. If the environment REALLY collapses back down onto a handful of gasping humans, we're going to all find out how hard it is to get salt, let alone sulfur. If you really want to be Green, you might want to start figuring out how to build a really good bow and arrow - by hand, not bought at Wal-Mart - or, more simply, learn to make nooses and nets and fishing line. Start now; it's not as easy as it looks, and takes a lot more time than you think.

On the other hand, if you don't think of yourself as Green, but you feed the poor, save animals, clean beaches, take only what you need and try to give back and be grateful, and can make a Hoko River splinter knife out of what you found on the beach - you're a Green. 

Greens party better, and we're going to survive. Come to the verdant side.

Drugs, Heroes and Blindness

A promising young man recently committed suicide up here. According to town rumor, it's because the army decided he was "overweight" and he'd "disappointed his uncle." These are only rumors. 

I saw this kid at graduation. If the rumor is true, it's a lie. Supposedly, the army yanked away his future, and he shot himself. Again, the family is torn to pieces, and not sharing exact information - but it's all over town, through one rumor or another. 

A grandmother up here was furious about recruiters at the high-school job days. The army acts like one of those bad religious groups, looking for the suffering and dead-end to lie to and suck into the machine. I'm explaining "pension rank" to everybody - the fact that, in order to guarantee s/he'll retire as a general and not a colonel, a general really needs a war. And recruiters have quotas, and will commit suicide themselves, if they can't meet them.

While delivering food-bank food to a dying man, I saw a group of kids clustered near his door, in the parking lot. They were discussing something that had upset them. They were also waiting for their drug dealer (from the looks of them, probably the locally-produced meth). 

These kids, waiting for a pain-killer, were hurt by the death of a school hero. 

Hoquim recently put together a block watch. What are they most concerned with, about kids? Cleaning off graffiti. Not why the kids are suffering and hunting paint, alcohol and meth. Not why they're in pain and need help. They have pretty new uniforms, but where is the outreach to the suffering, and the kids already on the streets? These kids all know each other, regardless of how they try to cut them up into us vs. them. The "us" and "them" is actually by generation - and the "us" isn't doing a very good job helping "them."

The old guard up here is disgusting. Loggers are clear-cutting in a wildlife/wetland area right next to the dead boy's town. They hit their jake-brakes when going by campgrounds in the Olympic National Park. The people from the 1950's are gleeful that trees are going down. All they can see is a football game - not just cash, but the domination of the Enemy, Nature. And guess who they call "eco-terrorists?"

Wildlife and trees and tourism, that can offer so many working positions - not just jobs - for all the kids for the future. These people raise money for scholarships for kids, but how will those kids get to stay here if there's nothing?

The Clallam Bay Comicon may have to be witness to what the old guard does to the community. The place may be wrecked for our generation - but the only thing that really stopped wholesale whaling and overfishing of cod were the collapses of populations. So maybe the west end needs to die before it can live. 

But why do we always have to go through a resurrection?

We need to reach out to all the kids, because all the kids know each other. And they're asking what we're doing with their planet, and why we're only leaving them scraps and mud. That look in a sad kid's eyes? That's blame - and helplessness.

Or is it? A kid up here is going to be building an anti-bullying website. Whenever we go hiking or to the beach, there's very little litter, and since kids are the ones who run farthest, they're the ones keeping it clean. Kids who love nature and know it's the future are stewarding now. They're cleaning up water and woods. They want modern logging techniques, not just ones that pay for the machinery, in a cut pay cut pay vicious circle. Fewer and fewer people are fishing except for food. The old paradigm of animals as toys and something to play with, for trophies (training for war) or catch and release (tormenting animals for the fun of it) is beginning to fade. The horrible 20th-century myth that only humans can feel and hurt is being hunted down and dispatched for what it was and is - an industrial excuse for treating our fellow peoples on this planet as so many tools and cash bags.

The old guard calls people like us "wimps." This is another word for "meek." Only the green will survive - and who do you think will inherit the earth?

(And why am I bothering to write this? Because it's the only weapon I have against the spoilers. And so nobody can accuse me of not trying, and for turning a blind eye. I don't want to be the one to stumble in surprise on the tattered remnants, and claim I never knew. And the more I can spread this, the less able others will ever be able to say, "But we didn't know!" I don't want to have to say, "I told you so!" again - but I'll probably have to. I really hate looking this prescient, every single time, when past lessons should have taught us better. And we're still testing animals to see if THEY can learn? What was the definition of insanity, again?)

On the Record for Re-directing the Glacier

Okay. Miss Mouth has run her opinions about Only The Green Will Survive up here for ten years. Why? Because I had one of those clear dreams when I got here that ONLY when the town has a yearly high-class raft art and media world show out in the bay MAY I move, if I ever want to.

All this in a logging and sports fishing and trophy hunting area, where the main small town is convinced the cougars and wolves are out to get them (and the other small town laughs at them for it). 

After blathering with a co-op member the other day on the phone, Miss Mouth got herself invited to speak at a special co-op treasurer's meeting on how to make the future work, hooking up media, the green agenda, bla bla bla. So finally my junkbox brain and nosiness (I have a license for that, being the local stringer) finally come to some use. 

Oh, and the line I use that everybody now agrees with: "When you're down to slime eels and chipboard, your resource industries are DONE." (And thank you Twilight for teaching the larger town that MEDIA MAKES MONEY).

And the Comicon starting to roll probably didn't hurt either: