Pacific Crest Trail - Day 37 - Zero in Cajon Pass
To will is to stir up paradoxes.
—Albert Camus
Well, shit. I just want to hike.
Decided to weather the storm at a hotel in Cajon Pass, which also presented an opportunity to eat McDonalds and Subway. Hey, desperate times call for desperate measures. I’m sure the FDA is still intact and operational, right. Right?!
This picture makes approximately zero sense to me after a month on trail. 1. Why are we always in a rush to get someplace else? 2. The occupants of all of the cars and all of the cargo in the traffic in this photo would fit in 5 train cars each way, tops. 3. California just passed Japan as the world’s 5th largest economy and has zero high speed rail. 4. Motorized vehicles aren’t a substitute for personality. Sick baby blue Mustang GT, bro.
As if we needed a metaphor for the hippie movement.
I’ll stop with the cheap shots and defer to David Graeber who wrote a much more thoughtful, charitable essay on the topic:
A practical utopians guide to the coming collapse
Don’t let the “dire” title dissuade you from consideration.
It does often seem that, whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last great world revolution, were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible.
The human imagina- tion stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed on that collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to crumble overnight.
Anyway, here’s some low speed rail! The future is here! Buy a new truck! Now offering payments until your actuarial projected death!
Cajon Pass wildflowers. Stunning.
