THE FRANKENSTEIN EFFECT OF OUR WRONGDOINGS

By Julian Sudre

My imagination could have stretched like Spandex and sharply snapped back with surgical precision into modern 21rst century, visualising a farrago of environmental riptides gushing their way through the outgrown misgivings of my fears. Fortunately, I am no Rip Van Winkle and what I have doubted for so long is only accentuated by being more real than ever.

The whirlpools of human greed have jolted the placid waters of our ancestors; our energy consumption has tripled since 1970 to the equivalent of almost 30 million tonnes of oil a year while energy to light homes and run household appliances has rocketed by 135 per cent in the period. The problem is not cultural but sociological.

The effects of modern life could to all intents and purposes alter our attitudes to our lifestyle and produce a considerable shift in family patterns. Such phenomenon would create a divide in natural harmony with what is normally perceived as complimentary and elementary to the healthy progress of humanity. We unconsciously ratchet up a level of unnaturalness in our life today that it has become out of keeping with a progressive society.

The continuous growth of the population alongside a spirit of competitiveness cannot sustain the pressure of markets forces on one end and the politics of nations on the other. Slowly, we have come to see that the perpetual law of the fittest is eroding our mental capacity to separate the wheat from the chaff and the resulting factor transforms a family into a bilious synthesis of fractured monstrosity. The bedeviled cadence of marriage versus divorce has swung in favour of celibacy bending our instinct to find comfort amongst not our fellowship but towards self-centred work occupations that impart the whiff of money aplenty. And whoosh comes the charge that we people double up as electrodes linked to a world of turbocharged rewards that have us gasping for more. Divorces can be magicked at a click of a button so the traditional marriage with all its consequences has lost its sanctimonious weight. The ungraciously easiness to hammer through ceremonial protocols almost obliges to be an irrelevant feature of modern society. We have invented plastic surgery to cut out the flab of time-consuming rituals that today have fallen by the wayside.

In Britain, the population should reach 70 million by 2028 according to the Office for National Statistics, more homes will be required and we are not talking about 4 bedroom houses but more likely to have one bedroom or two-bedroom flats built that will see to unmarried, put-your-nose-to-the-grindstone males and females who will be using even more energy than their parents. Of course, I would not want to paint a grim picture of the states of things to come but on a sociological level, we have been more inclined to forgo family etiquette for business priorities, discarding the importance to discern primal values in our lifestyles and thereby reducing our perspectives to minimal contentment.

I must say unless there is war or natural disaster to "reboot" mankind's peripheral visions, there will be a continual demand for more energy until we slam the the no-more option button.

But because the pace of life is far to quick, we haven't got much time to meditate and step out of the game, we get stuck inside and our direction veers a wee off everyday. We are warned at times to tweak our tack, the signals become louder in the ears of the wise but the rest ignores the fundamental philosophy of our existence. The rules are cast away and our assets, the ones we have accumulated, the ones that make us more alive, the ones that scream for modernisation are slowly destroying us. We acknowledge the dangers but spurn them offhandedly simply because we think it won't happen to us.

At least, we cannot deny we were not told; if we ate the apple , we will be the only to be blamed for and it will be too late to change anything afterwards.