September Second 2023
Inflation, more Inflation, then Explosion.
Inflation is much more than an increase in the cost of food and other consumption items. Take Putin, the Russian dictator: he represents inflation because war always leads to higher prices, armed conflict always destroys dwellings, always burns trees, always wounds and kills people and animals, and always causes fires: Climate Change does the same!. Putin, personally, suffers from super self-esteem, Hubris, the word for overweening pride, a form of inflated ego, something the entire Western world also suffers from. We behave as if earth’s finite resources are infinite, now disappearing in fire and smoke or smothered by too much water or not enough, causing foodstuffs and other essentials, such as potable water, to disappear, the source of extreme inflation: welcome to the Age of Extremes.
Global Boiling.
Of course, Global Boiling brings inflation, because Climate Change boils down to being a war on Creation. Just as war is waged to cause regime change – at a colossal cost, and often not achieving the initial goal – so the battle to ameliorate the effects of Climate Change may actually do more harm than good. The Electric Vehicle phenomenon is a case in point: some 400kg of scarce natural resources, often ripping up precious forests in Africa and elsewhere, cause irreparable damage to fragile ecosystems. Also, much of the raw material needed to build the batteries at the heart of these new motors, is controlled by China, now the world’s leading EV manufacturer.
Face it: the major factor of increasing inflation is the changing climate. Suddenly the whole world is up in arms. God is hiding his face and withdraws his presence; God sits back, and watches what’s happening on the earth with its eight billion human beings, now all of them fully aware that the earth and the fulness thereof is no longer able to sustain all that lives and moves and has a being. Everything and everybody is under stress and unable to maintain itself, while the resources, water, air, soil, are shrinking and the available basics are disappearing, causing inflation and unavailability at any price.
Wartime conditions.
I am old enough to have lived, as a teenager, through the years of war – 1940-45 – in German-occupied the Netherlands. Then suddenly all imports ceased, oranges, bananas, coffee, tea, simply disappeared, including TOBACCO, yes, that poisonous item, became more precious than gold! All foodstuff was rationed, all new clothes disappeared and fuel was basically non-existent, while electricity was only sporadically available: barter was the key to staying alive, as money could no longer buy the essentials.
Of course, these conditions did not appear overnight: it took months and even a few years to bite with a vengeance. Today the situation is the same, but world-wide. The poor in tropical countries already feel the effects: that’s why they risk their lives to come to the paradisical West to find out that there too Paradise is Lost. For us, the reckoning too, will come, will come sudden and abrupt for most.
Will humans change? No way: Each day I do my 6,000 steps on the Canada Trail bisecting Tweed. I often am the only walker, but not the only user: for every walker there are 4 ATVs, dusty, noisy, polluting: for these operators the tipping point will come as a total surprise: sudden, unexpected, out of the blue.
The near future: Change
The coming years will have no equal. They will be drastically different. They will not replicate the experience of the 1920s or the 1940s. The idea that we can recover from the fiscal and monetary excesses of the past decades without economic pain — at a time of political polarization and geopolitical conflict — seems historically implausible. The only thing constant is change. It’s not just that hard things happen without adequate notice and in a short period of time; it’s that a lot of things happen without adequate notice in a short period of time.
Given all this, prepare mentally and spiritually for a steadfast change. The new situation we face – shortages, even collapse – forces us to focus on what we can control and let go of what we cannot.
Not surprisingly Revelation reveals inflation too as a hallmark of the last days, indicated by the rider of the black horse (Rev. 6:5) who carries a scale, and says: “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages.” Both that scale and these words signify poverty, hunger and inflation. The prices mentioned here are about eight times the prices normal in those days, explains the footnote.
Our economic system is based on stability. Our war against creation wrings its neck, tightens its noose, kills the goose, leads to explosion and clears the deck for Christ’s return.