What's that up ahead?

All of this literature hints at a disturbing future, doesn't it?

All of the systems that serve us make our reality almost incredible; unreal. Just pick up some garbage at  Wal Mart and imagine the supply chain that created it. Look at a chair.

For the plastic, petroleum was drilled with some massive contraption and huge workforce somewhere in the world, then it was loaded onto a tanker, managed by another workforce, and taken to a refinery, managed by another company and workforce, where it was injected through some unimaginably complicated chemical and physical process to turn crude oil into crude plastic.

All of the metals were mined in some other far away place by workers of an undisclosed nationality working on huge machines (also the product of an elaborate production process) powered by petroleum. Metals were refined in all the extent of that process, then eventually loaded onto a tanker bound for somewhere.

And the wood and the hardware followed a similar process.

Then, of course, they all arrive to some factory in China (powered by petroleum) where thousands of pairs of hands cooperate to assemble this global conglomeration of material into something worth an American's money.

Then, again, its loaded amidst a million other consumer goods onto a great tanker ship, powered across the ocean (by petroleum) to the United States, where a huge hoard of big rig trucks (powered on petroleum) take it off to Wal Marts (powered on petroleum) at small intervals of distance across our country.

Now, actually, I have become curious. How close is the average American to a Wal Mart? How easy has our addiction become to satisfy? I will try to do the math, at which I am very un-practiced, to determine the average distance to Wal Mart:

The area of the 48 states is 2,959,064 square miles. There are about 8,000 Wal Mart stores here.

8,000 Wal Marts / 2,959,064 sq miles = ~1 Wal Mart / ~ 400 sq Miles

√400 sq miles = 20 miles 

20mi^2 + 20mi^2 = 800 sq mi

√800 sq mi = ~ 28 mi

28 mi/2 = 14 mi

A rough average linear distance to the nearest Wal Mart store. 

Wal Mart is kind of like crack for Americans. We really need a lot of it, it seems. But, the more we grow our dependence on both the fantastical supply chain and the tens of millions of impoverished laborers in far and distant lands, the graver our symptoms of with drawl will someday be.This cannot last forever.

In a day where petrofuels become scarce, our economic alliance with the Chinese becomes compromised, or the financial system that lubricates this great consumer machine falters and dies (a future that nearly manifested itself in 2000 and even more in 2008), the outcome will be unimaginably catastrophic for American people. We won't only miss televisions and toasters, but food and clothes, Probably, many, many people would die in conditions a thousand times worse than our last Great Depression. 

There will be no trucks bringing all the stuff around you into our supermarkets. We wont have nails to build our houses, nor shoes or socks to cover our feet. For all the uncountable years past, humans took care of themselves, handcrafting all the things they needed to live on Earth. They actually took care of themselves. Until extremely recently, it was quite normal for any person to consume about as much as they produced, and to understand the direct coorelation between work and production. 

Now, two hours of work making sandwiches at minimum wage apparently pays the costs of a slice of a supply chain that spans all the continents, tens of thousands of workers, thousands of great machines, and thousands of miles traveled to bring me this $10 chair.

But this isn't reality, is it?