The Long Slide

We are now all dependent on lies

Mike Meyer
3 min readSep 20, 2024

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Photo by Büşra Salkım on Unsplash

Why has Paul Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away” come to haunt me? It’s an old song of sad futility. The closer we get to our destination, the more we are slip, sliding away.

For the majority who have watched the understanding of what overshoot means and how our planetary climate has been changed away from what we need, we thought things were as good as gone. But despite everything Biden handed off to Kamala, who has proven to be an excellent politician.

The song is worth a listen. In the wake of Kamala’s burst of hope, with the limits of what she is allowed to be, and the insistence of as many people as they say to stick with Trump, we seem to be lying in bed and thinking of things that might have been. Our cultural disease is well advanced.

We know the end of this is more than sad, even at its best. An aging and decaying nation that is a failed remnant of another age cannot imagine a future that is not one of the massive overconsumption that has destroyed our world.

The majority of our population either does not care at all or can only see greed as our future. Asking how it came to this does not help. It has come to this, and we are unable even to imagine an exit from this long, slippery descent to our end.

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Mike Meyer

Writer, Educator, Campus CIO (retired) . Essays on our changing reality here, news and more at https://rlandok.substack.com/