Winter is coming

- 5 min read

But it won’t be that cold

For those few of you who aren’t Game of Thrones aficionados winter is coming is the motto of House Stark. In that universe winter also means that various creatures that don’t want humans to live start to wake, bring back the dead, and wreak havoc on the world. I want to talk about a different kind of winter, the one that creates a tunnel that only some of us get through. In evolutionary terms, things like the last ice age.

In chess there is the concept of Zugzwang, (it comes from the German meaning must move) where pieces are set up to perfectly support and defend each other but, the way the game is played, a move must happen that breaks the formation and it is undone. We humans have reached such a place. The mass delusion that is capitalism is running out of people and resources to turn into profit, the climate disaster is in full flow and nothing is being done, the people who profit from racism and murder in places like Palestine, and all over the world, are at their last gasp and don’t seem to realise it. Those of us who used to live in relative comfort from the crumbs that fell from the table of the rich or stolen from the poor undeveloped countries in Europe and America are discovering the crumb supply is no more, and the things we need to survive, never mind make life tolerable, are being taken from us at an ever increasing rate. The folks in the global south never had that luxury, or maybe only had it for a brief time in the 1960s, before their countries were overwhelmed by the corporations that have robbed them ever since. As Michael Parenti pointed out the countries themselves are rich, rich in resources, but the people are poor, because global capitalism keeps them that way. He also said extreme wealth and extreme poverty are the same thing, can’t have one without the other.

The road we walk as a species is narrowing and many of us aren’t going to get through to wherever it takes us next, assuming it isn’t a dead end. Unless, of course, we do something about it. There’s the rub. The comfortable life of beery Christmas farts and happy oblivion while someone else does the fixing and the worrying are long over. There’s also the serious problem that we are being lied to, bamboozled and swindled out of our lives and happiness by people pretending they care about us. As all…