The best thing that human civilization could do to help regain the edenic health of the planet we have devastated and survive the cure it will require over the next five hundred years, would be to turn off all our switches and go dormant for the next five hundred years. The next best thing we can do is quit wiggling in the quicksand, by turning off all our switches and leaving the slightest imaginable trace of our ever having existed on the face of the earth, sort of a community service, wherein even the most removed from and antagonistic to nature among us must learn to survive by symbiosis with what was once considered mere property.
I was a very impressionable kid when the “good” war was being taken to Tojo, Hitler and Mussolini. I knew because of the newsreels after the crowing white rooster and the unmistakable characatures of Roosevelt’s “axis of evil” in the cartoons that followed that. Just as strongly I remember our saving balls of string, balls of tin foil separated from gum wrappers and cigarette packs, stacks of paper along with every household in our neighborhood. Garbage collection almost went out of work. As a whole, like I haven’t seen this country unified to such an extent since, the tremendous personal contributions to the war effort made the air alive and exciting for me. I sold apples and cherries from our trees out of my wagon for the red cross and drew fighter planes on every piece of paper I came across.
Here it is, sixty some years later, with a threat of human caused planetary climate change that has consequences making all the axes of evil ever since, put together, look like little kids playing with pea shooters, and where is that gung ho spirit I remember? There is a dedicated field of individuals independently self appointed to reduce their foot print and quietly enlighten others to awake and lighten up as well, but far too few to influence the unity I saw as a child. It looks like this is one of those times to do things ahead of their time, as Robert Redford was heard to say. It is time to quit making our mark in life, the earth is scarified enough.
Some time back there there was a big public outcry about how trashy things were, so, rather than buck the packaging lobby bribes, legislation was passed providing more trash cans and sponsoring litter campaigns to get it all out of sight and a too slight nod toward voluntary recycling, with nary a peep about the proliferation of trash by the packaging industry, the true source of the blight. So now the garbage collectors are giving the earth plastic and styrofoam implants on hollows just outside of town — where the next subdivision will be in twenty years. All public involvement not focused on war has gone downhill since then, and that protest needs some heat as well.
I have heard various plans to hit the mule of the industrial military complex in the head hard enough to get its attention to the source of its life blood, our paychecks, from everyone surreptitiously hoarding six months worth of necessities and, as one, stop shopping (in disobedience to Bush’s post 9/11/01 triage) for six months to something as bizarre as actually kicking the addiction to the American Way of Life for the sake of cultures around the world being forced to eat mcdonalds. The finances for US exploitation are supplied by its citizens' heedless greedy consumption and the labor of the exploited.
I have heard congressman Conyers, just yesterday on Democracy Now, say that he would love to nail the Bush/Chaney regime with impeachment but there is not enough time before their terms are up and the congress must get on with the 2008 elections. Riiiiight!!! With a government bureaucracy so corrupted by these crooks’ reign for seven years, not to mention the electoral system that let them in in the first place, protecting the status quo schedule seems like trying to keep everything in its place while the titanic goes down. We must nail the lying bastards while they still hold jobs working for us under oath.
Okay, that’s enough steam for now. I wish it could power a congress willing not only to rearrange the furniture, but rebuild the entire moldy house.
2 comments:
Wow. Excellent Post, I wish I had your eloquence. My Dad talks a lot about how life used to be on the farm and how NOTHING was every so useless as to get thrown away. Everything was repurposed and recycled until there was virtually nothing left but air. Of course, that was before plastic -- the low-class material that never goes away....
Fear not, landfills will turn out to be like squirrels hiding nuts for lean times if we survive the hot, wet times. Excuse me, the desparate sarcasm drooleth.
Post a Comment