Please forgive or indulge these summertime musings, but it’s finally sunk in that, in my lifetime, the human population of this planet has tripled and, given the marvels of modern medicine, I may live to see it quadruple, though I doubt there’ll be much joy in that.

Americans represent 5% of the current planetary population of 8 billion. Yet we consume 25% of the world’s natural resources. I was taught in grade school that that was cause for pride, proof of our American exceptionalism, our greatness. Of course the dollar was worth 13 times more then than it is now. But that may prove true of everything we hold dear.

In 1797, English sailors went on strike, protesting the fact that they had not received a pay increase in 130 years. We worry about inflation, but time is accelerating beyond our comprehension.

If I was better read or better organized, I might understand what all of this is leading to, but I’m not and I can’t. I have trouble spelling acceleration, never mind living it.

In my youth I was troubled by the specter of everyone going hungry, everyone suffering, and I tried to imagine solutions. Oddly enough, some of my imaginings — drawings — are on exhibit right now in a museum in Munich, 50 years after the fact. Back then, I excelled in an idealism that my professors found endearing. In those heady days of endless possibility, naivete was considered not a mask but a virtue. I didn’t understand or maybe just refused to acknowledge that there’s a sliding scale to the economy of human affairs and that even if or when 99% of us are starving, 1% will still be enjoying foie gras on some man-made island in Dubai, or on Mars. Today, worldwide, anyone earning $60,000 a year after taxes is in that 1%. But $60k won’t get you past the bouncers on a rocket to Mars. It’s probably now 1% of 1%. And that doesn’t include me, and probably not you either; but I don’t care for those people anyway.

So what about those of us stuck on Earth? How will we survive when treasuries have all been ransacked, safety nets dismantled and sold for scrap, and education is just an online subscription with IT as faculty, and AI writes and peer-reviews your papers? When government exists only to collect or confine? What happens when we’re on our own, laid off or dropped out?

Well, we managed pretty well here in this place once, probably better than most. Our anarchist, outlaw counterculture supported education, health, housing, nutrition, innovation, art and music, and friendship, all of it under the radar. We didn’t need no badges, diplomas, certifications, grants, inspections, permits, unions, subsidies, waiting lists or authority of any kind. Neither did we need new cars, paid vacations, retirement plans, workers comp, influencers, bucket lists or emotional support animals. We could afford to be poor, at least until we got our bearings and found our place in this place. What a luxury that was.

Maybe we’ve already lost all of that. And maybe there’s no getting it back. Maybe we casually surrendered our autonomy, agency and, most tragically, the stamina to stand and the confidence to dig where we stand. A while back, I heard Valentin Lopez of the Amah Mutsun tribal council acknowledge that, through two relentless centuries of marginalization, extermination and enforced isolation from the lands they had so long guarded and sustained, his people had lost much of the knowledge of that work, but were now stepping forward to put their backs into it once again, knowing that over time the honest work of repair would return wisdom and health to the land and its people.

We’ve worked ourselves into our own corner here. We’ve surrendered our own initiative, resourcefulness and responsibility for supporting and providing for, employing, feeding and housing each other. Will we ever get that back? We’ll find out soon enough.

Mark Primack is a regular Santa Cruz Sentinel correspondent and would like to hear from you at mark@markprimack.com.