What Now?

As I sip my tea this morning, I'm contemplating the recent Supreme Court ruling that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections, which, alongside the fact that a bill has recently been introduced in the TN Legislature (House Bill 0614) which is designed to delay the enactment of the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act and gut the audit provisions by prohibiting the implementation of new voting machines that leave a paper trail, most certainly tolls a further death knell to the survival of fair and uncorrupted elections, and ultimately to our democracy (with a small "d"). It's a sad moment when you realize that a great many of your elected leaders, and 5 out of 9 Supreme Court Judges, feel greater concern for the welfare and well-being of the richest corporate entities in the world, and their insidious and destructive influence on our ability to choose whom we wish to represent us based on factual data rather than lies, distortions and deliberate misinformation, than they do for the American people - or at least those of us who do not constitute the wealthiest 5%.
At the same time, the market is flooded with books and articles predicting the imminent collapse of our ecological, social and economic systems as a natural outcome of over-consumption, ever-increasing debt, exponential population growth, pollution and deforestation, species extinction and habitat loss, ecosystem disruption, mass depletion of essential resources such as water and petroleum (not to mention arable land, living soil, natural gas, essential minerals such as iron ore, and much more), and of course good old climate change, bringing an assortment of goodies our way including ocean acidification, sea-level rise and plankton die-off, erratic weather patterns, flooding and desertification... the list goes on and on.
These are not cheerful subjects to contemplate - yet contemplate them we must, if we are to find some way of creating the changes necessary to avert worst case scenarios and begin in earnest to descend the slippery slope of our addiction to... basically everything. Does this mean we need to work entirely outside existing, established structures and paradigms in order to do so? Is capitalism, with it's insistent mantra of perpetual growth on a finite planet, now revealing it's identity as a system that has become utterly obsolete - despite outraged protests to the contrary, shouted mainly from the corporate-worshipping political Right? Is it even realistic to imagine there is anything to be done in such a well-rounded predicament but to sigh and capitulate, allowing the numbness of denial to wash over us once again and temporarily quell the growing sense of helplessness? Quitting IS, in fact, an option - but it's not nearly as compelling as the struggle to awaken to a deeper meaning, a deeper - and perhaps radically altered - understanding of our place in the world. I think I'll stick around and see what happens next.