Krokodil is what the end of the world looks like

Krokodil is what the end of the world looks like.

Without civilization, krokodil’s existence wouldn’t be possible.

No chemists to synthesize the substances it is made from.

No drugstores and no money to buy it.

No ruined natural environment that cannot support living communities anymore.

No children with such a terrible life as to trade it away for a few minutes of normality.

No traumatized people to become so desensitized to other people’s suffering.

No police to ignore, tolerate and maintain drug and human trafficking while pretending to fight them.

No politicians to get richer and more powerful while causing the use of narcotics.

As long as civilization stands, there will be people willing to take any risks necessary to escape from it.

One day there will be enough people willing to take any risks necessary to bring down civilization, and krokodil will be nothing but a bad dream, a ghost from the past.

The title of this writing has been inspired by an essay called “Pornography is what the end of the world looks like” by Robert Jensen. It is something worth reading.

Dummy girl

This is probably one of the best symbols for what woman is in this last installment of patriarchal society. 

She has no face, the first sign of someone’s individuality. How many times men tell themselves and to each other that “women are all the same, whores, bitches, shrews…”? Women’s psychology is so boring, just neuroses and hysteria, it’s not that interesting like men’s, they don’t turn into psychopaths who go on a rampage and don’t have mythological delusions and hallucinations. No, there’s no need for a head. 

The plastic chest is empty and there is no soul in there. The soul is just brain patterns and neurotransmitters, so you need a brain to have a soul. And you also need eyes to be able to express your soul to the outside world. There is also an empty space instead of the womb. There was a time when women were providing food and giving birth by their terms, but with the advent of agriculture this task is now the responsibility of men. Since then the woman has become another tool for helping the man who builds dams, irrigates, plows, sows, harvests and otherwise creates everything else surrounds us.

 

There’s a bosom, but no child in her arms. The image of a mother with a child was used by former versions of patriarchy, but in these times of overpopulation the nurturing mother is not useful anymore or is not selling good, better a young girl, with a body and sexuality just ready to be taken over. 

The hands are cold and devoid of their healing power; the stance is motionless, immovable, suggesting that the fixed image of a young charming sexual body is better than the continuous flow of time and experiences. 

The dummy is in a shop, behind a glass window, with some sexy clothes and the word “sale” over her body. There is no more privacy or intimacy, and as long as you can sell your body (which is the only valuable part of yourself) you are worthy of being seen, measured, compared with others, but never heard (you have no mouth remember?)

Or maybe I am too analytical and put interpretations where they shouldn’t be.

Fair Trade

Yesterday I’ve been in a fair trade shop for the first time. I wanted to buy some presents for Christmas. Most of what they have is coffee, tea, wine, toys, pottery and some clothes. Really nice stuff, made in Guatemala, India or Vietnam, and fair trade shops are certainly needed now and in the future, as something to thwart away the politics of global economy. But it is not enough.

Staple foods like wheat, corn, rice or potatoes are not fair trade. For every fair trade shop there are hundreds other around it full of fruits and vegetables produced by literally poisoning the environment. Billions of people are wasting away their health and lifetime to fill up these other shops. We leave the shops and walk on streets, and not deep beneath the pavement, the soil is choking to death because she can’t breathe, and every night she’s dreaming about nurturing life again. While the soil is dreaming this, we live in concrete-made houses, we sleep in beds made of timber, surrounded by wardrobes made of timber also, and there’s no real forest around us in any direction, no forest but a few trees and bushes and clearly confined parks. The wardrobes are full of clothes we are bored of already, and not a single dream we had about people who made those clothes. Cars, plastic bottles, tin cans, leather shoes, mobile phones, perfumes, flowers, central heating, light bulbs and electric light, jewelry, none of these are fair trade, yet they are more than 99% of the objects that make our life. 

I think that people who put up fair trade shops are doing a wonderful job. Most people say that it is a start, and in the coming years more and more fair trade shops will pop up. But I wonder how many years does it have to take to make all trade fair. What if fair trade shops act more like a social sedative, something to appease the people from Western countries, make them hope that change is possible, while they can continue with consumerism?

In a holocaust that was started hundreds of years ago, we gave colored beads to natives from other continents, in exchange for food, shelter, guidance, gold, friendship, their land and their identity. They liked the beads, or an iron axe, or a rifle or a mirror. The natives thought it was a fair trade, but the colonists knew it wasn't fair. They knew it all the time.

Why are we lying to ourselves?