The Giant

The blundering giant noticed a creature crawling on the ground.

 

“It looks weak and thirsty.  I will help it into the blades of grass where it can drink the dew,” the giant thought.

It did not occur to the dim-witted giant that there used to be many creatures below his feet, and now there was just this little one.

His boots and his size protected him for the moment, so to speak, from the poison that was on the field of “green.”  A poison he did not even realize was there.

He picked up the creature and tossed it into the grass, then walked merrily away, whistling at how pleased he was with himself for his deed of kindness.

And the creature, which had crawled away from the poisoned ground where its fellows had suffered their fate, now writhed in its last fatal agony in the poisoned grass.   If it could have read, it might have known, in its last thoughts, the irony of the words on the large sign above its head: 

Lawn “Care.” 

Did A Generation Ever Love Its Descendants Less?

2014 was the hottest year on record, and 14 of the record 15 hottest have been in this century.  The 1998 El Nino year was the only other.

We have comforted ourselves in the selfish expectation that any results of our actions or inactions about the environment will only manifest significantly after we are gone.

Truly, we will be judged as evil idiots.

Are we not setting our world up for sudden, dramatic climate change?  The release of so much methane as the tundra and arctic regions thaw will accelerate climate change, probably geometrically. Already, places which once had moderate winters have severe ones now because the arctic is not warm enough to keep the cold air there, leaving the cold air blasts to sweep down.

Oh wait, the Chair of the Senate Environmental Committee says that only proves that global warming isn’t happening. Oklahoma, can’t you do better?

Silver Plus 20 Anniversary. Yawn.

Earth Day’s 45^th came and went.  A flickeringly brief news item.  But still the shills for the fossil fuels industry and their financial allies dominate the (mostly non) conversation.

And the assertive deniers—the invincibly ignorant—all too readily accept the shills’ utterly unscientific drivel. 

In fact, in this and many other things, they wear their certainty like armor to shield them from the real truth of the world that tries to touch them.

No Canon

Don’t canonize the World War Two generation.  They were indeed great, and we owe much to them, but they had great faults too.  They accepted, largely without question, environmental damage in return for apparent economic prosperity. They created the CIA.  They passed the National Security Act. They wittingly and unwittingly embraced, without much remorse, all the gross excesses of anti-communism.  At the height of their voting power, they welcomed (albeit without always realizing it) an economic and political ideology that would end up gutting the middle class.  

Vacuousa a la Roma

The ethical decline of selfish “elites,” and the spiritual vacuousness of the West in general, and the US in particular, are demonstrated in how many non-elites are willing to join anything with a sense of surety, even if that surety comes with a violent and regressive nature, as with the Islamic State group.  If that surety is also trying to overthrow the often corrupt and often self-serving Western and Western-supported order, it finds even more attraction.  Those willing to join have morphed from Middle-Eastern related people to people of all kinds.  Will this cause the West, and especially the US, to look at itself?  Unlikely.  What is more likely is that the West will merely escape into more diversion, denial, and blind reaction.  A foundational crisis—already in motion from environmental and other factors—could be in the offing, and failing to meet that crisis would signal the decline and fall, however slowly or quickly, of Western civilization.  Ironically, just as much of the world wants so many elements of that civilization. 

Rather like Rome less than 2000 years ago.

Amazing That It's Not Amazing

I have people tell me, with a straight face, the most fantastical things.  They say these things even though they know I am a PhD.  Like I should believe them, based on an article they supposedly read that was allegedly written by some supposedly smart-whip scientist, instead of believing what 97% of scientists have concluded.  Most of the time I find something else to do rather than poke on their emotional, factless, mis/disinformation bubble, but occasionally I’ll ask where I can find the article.  Most of the time, they can’t recall.  The few times they can, it’s not from some scientific journal, but only something on a website NOT affiliated with a government, educational organization, or research center.

GD America, quit showing Hedges to be correct.  Because I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to be correct!

Tarred and Choked

The next time you hear the self-serving, letting-oneself-off-the-hook, powerless-fomenting, justifying assertion about highly polluting tar sands oil that “the oil will go someplace; it will get drilled regardless,” there is another statement you need to put with it:   “Pay, oil-slaves.  Choke on your planet.” 

Just Like Your Body Needs Your Good Regulation Of It

Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Corporate America in general are all self-referential echo chambers of “no regulation!”

You need regulation, you need government.  Or what happened to BitCoin is inevitable: sophisticated criminals pillage you without recourse.  And that is only the beginning of troubles.

Ideologies often don’t hold up to analysis.

The Formerly Pure--And Pure Nonsense

Remember when rainwater was considered “pure?”  We’d stick our tongues out and taste the purity.

Largely no longer. The amount of impurities in typical rainwater today has made a little mockery of that. 

Those are the things—the things that matter—we need to be upset about, talking about, contacting our “representatives” about.  Not being upset and talking about the words or actions of some “celebrity,” or emotive anguish and repeatedly expressed and discussed crushing disappointment over some sports team or sports figure.

Because our emphasis on those fleeting spectacle things just show how easily we  are led (and lead ourselves) into deflective, delusional, self-destructive irrationality.

Stay In, Tune Out, Get Sluggish, Get Foggy

We spend too much time indoors, sitting or laying down, breathing indoor air, getting little or no exercise.

At Christmas, I could enlist no one to take a walk after dinner.  That is, after engorgement on copious amounts of food, much of it sweet or otherwise not good for us.  Could get no one to take a walk in 30s degree weather with no wind.  I walked the trails and never met another person. My son, 20, said, “Are you crazy, dad? It’s December.”

If we are that appallingly weak, we have no chance to maintain this “system” or this “empire.”  Events—Nature or a stronger culture—will eat us like a lion eating kittens.

Better

What should become part and parcel of our character, and first and foremost on our minds? Simply this: To make it a better world for more of us than for fewer of us.

Circle of Toxicity

It is unnatural to be under constant stress, as people in our society often are, especially in these economically trying times. Being under constant stress first compromises, then degrades, then exhausts the immune system. We then become susceptible to all sorts of things. Add to that how thoroughly we have contaminated our environment and our food and water, utterly overloading our ability to neutralize and expel toxins, and you have a prescription for toxic excess to tick like a time bomb.

We have to address things holistically if we are to do anything more than run exhausted from one crisis to another—or to make the connections that most of those crises are…connected.

Things Change And They Don't

One highly important subject you didn’t hear much about this campaign season, and effectively squat during the four mainstream debates: Climate Change.

Scientists and environmentalists say we are fighting over deck chair places on the Titanic, instead of figuring a way to get to some lifeboats or fashion things to help us, and maybe, just MAYBE, plug the hole and avert catastrophe.

And yet we say nothing when the candidates don’t even discuss the subject.

There’s a reason that the quote above remains week in and week out.

It Can't Last

It can’t last.  The truly aware know it, and even the vaguely aware sense it at some level.    But they don’t know how to get from here to a better world.  They’re afraid of the pain.  Too late for that, Americanos.  You f’d the relatively “painless” escape valve up a long time ago.

We are in Doom Drift on a near-endlessly wide river.  If we drift all the way to the Fall(s), we go over the edge—Civilization Doom.  A strong, wrenching, all-out exertion by us can avert that, but we have to jettison a lot to have a chance at success—and to our detriment we continue to let the selfish, shortsighted, and criminally foolish be in control, as they have been for decades.

The other likely possibility is that a violent storm blows us way off course, and we smash into uncharted territory.  Many of us may perish in that, and many more as we struggle to survive in a harsh new reality.

I think this is a reason that books like World War Z (and obsession with “zombie apocalypses” in general) are so popular.  Like the sleepwalking populations of past political-economic entities such as the Roman, Ottoman, and Austrian-Hungarian empires, we recognize the signs of decay and the lack of any real measures by “the elites” to stop it.  In fact, we recognize that those elites are prime center of the decay.  Whether war, revolution, plague, famine, or disaster of some kind, wrenching change becomes acceptable to the populace at some level, even if not desired.

[By the way, World War Z is, in addition to widely informed—and worldly in the truest sense—insightful social commentary, it offers glimpses of possibility for a better future out of catastrophe, even while it condemns our present sloth and illusion embracing.  Maybe it is a best seller for more than just zombies. :)]

If drought continues, if climate change and its resultant destruction really does proceed past the tipping point (as many in the scientific community fear), if national economic and fiscal criminality proceed, if resource consumption accelerates while environmental destruction and pollution continue, if we at the same time remain married to finite fossil fuels and the ills that flow in every direction from them, then the cascade will have begun. 

We are doing next to nothing to recognize these interlocking threats (of which I have mentioned but a few!) and change course.  Will history—and our descendants—curse us?

Pleading With Their Tormentors Because "Their" Servants and Protectors Are Neither

Want an indication that the environmental battle is being lost?  The National Resource Defense Council’s best answer (and Robert Redford’s) to strip mining on public land is to ask you the citizen to write a letter to the CEOs of the strip mining companies. They aren’t even bothering to ask you to write a letter to your Congressman, or to the President, or the Secretary of the Department of the Interior. 

Perhaps ownership of the country has become nakedly apparent.

50th Anniversary

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s seminal book, Silent Spring.  In re-reading it after all these years, I am shaken, jolted, struck, shocked, and disturbed, all over again.  Why?  Because although we congratulated ourselves at having cycled back half a notch, we have in reality changed no ethic at all.  Sure, there are some bright spots, some successes, and our air, water, and soil MIGHT overall be a bit better than they were then, and yes, certain chemicals are banned (in the US) and rivers are rarely on fire anymore.  But we have no true environmental ethic.  We have slowed down—maybe—our descent into environmental self-poisoning and self-degeneration.  But we haven’t stopped, let alone reversed course.  We produce poisons, and continue to diffuse them everywhere, and they come back to do us in, as individuals and civilization.  When she dedicated her book to Albert Schweitzer, and his quote,“Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall.  He will end by destroying the earth,” she hoped we would really wake up.  We merely cracked one eyelid—and, with a few notable exceptions, went right on as before. 

Extraterrestrial and other existence beings must look on us as the most bizarre and unwise supposedly sentient creatures anywhere.  It is bad enough that we are a species that preys upon itself, but we also consciously poison ourselves, our habitats, and our posterity, not to mention the life around us.

Where are you, homo sapiens sapiens (wise, wise, humans)?  Do you really think you are separate from nature? Our self-destructive path is evident, yet we choose to ignore, instead embracing denial, diversion, escapism, and illusion.  We are not stewards of creation, we are monsters—mindless, selfish, destructive monsters.

Something to think—remember that seldom used faculty?—about the next time we have to choose, in another false dichotomy, “between jobs/money/foreign dependence/etc. and the environment.”

Not Failed Yet, But Failing

We are failing as a people.  Because we cling to illusion, to our emotionally anchored beliefs and false “facts.” Because, in Jack Nicholson’s character’s words, we “can’t handle the truth.”

And so the climate swirls in changes, summer arrives bizarrely early, the rhythms of nature are perverted, the economic guts of the country are eaten out. 

But hey, the game’s on.  Return to the anesthetic. 

Correcting the B.S. Machine

The tremendous amount of misinformation about “energy” being infused into the media outlets:  I often wonder how much  the transmitters really believe, how much is just fed to them, how much they do just to deliberately deceive and deflect, and how much they do solely because it’s their job. 

For instance, the current drivel, pushed by Levin and his ilk, about “the nation’s energy being controlled by the government,” and “nothing has been done by this administration, even when they controlled all the government.”

And to heap bizarre absurdity and outrageous falsehood upon bizarre absurdity and outrageous falsehood, the duplicitous then accuse others of being duplicitous.

Let’s just look at one small piece of ONE of the many assertions:  “Control of the government.”  Leaving aside what government really “controls” in a capitalistic economy dominated by wealthy and powerful corporations, “control’ of the (national) government means what exactly?  This current administration, of which I am no great fan, has found opposition in the judicial branch, especially at the top, so one of the main three branches has never been in its corner.  When its party “controlled” the Congress, the other of three branches, it didn’t really, because the vagaries of Senate rules allow a minority of 41 senators to block anything significant they want.  It is MUCH easier to obstruct and to subvert than it is to actually accomplish something.

The purveyors of disinformation are banking on people not knowing how their government “works.” 

And so the republic suffers in its ignorance.  And we get mindless clamoring for oil pipelines that will create few jobs, bring little oil to use here, do little to change prices, and, most importantly in our disconnected-from-results illusory culture, have no consideration of the perpetuation of how we poison ourselves and our biosphere.  And avoids TRANSFORMATION to a better world, to solve the problems of the present and future.  No, we would rather reach for the “easy” solutions offered by the visionless, the corrupt, the greedy.  Pay no attention to the climate effects of more oil. Particularly pay no attention to the incredibly polluting extraction methods of this “new” tar sand/shale oil supply.  Pay no attention to how heavily corrosive it is.  Pay no attention to how, when it spills--and it WILL spill, in both pipelines and tankers--it can’t really be cleaned up in any effective manner.  There is a 40 mile stretch of the Kalamazoo River in Michigan which is still off limits to use because of a “small” spill of this “new” oil TWO YEARS AGO.

And don’t find out what pair of brothers have their hands in many aspects of the proposed pipeline.

And don’t figure out that the price of gas is in large part a reflection of hedge funds, speculators, futures contracts, and international demand.  Or that there are taxpayer subsidies for refining, not just drilling.  Or that refined oil is our biggest manufactured export.

And don’t realize that climate change, unchecked, will cost, from weather devastation alone, greater than WW1, WW2, the Great Depression, and the Cold War, COMBINED.

Americans have become exceedingly proficient in straining at gnats and swallowing elephants.  And, of course, accepting most of the illusions that come their way.

The Ancients

The ancient philosophers took a great deal more opportunities to truly THINK than we usually do.  Consider, in this political season of hyperbole but without further comment, this quote from Aristotle’s Ethics, on what people should do in their behavior and their thinking “in order to become happy or to avoid unhappiness, the principal emphasis being placed on the cultivation of the virtues, both moral and intellectual, although other goods are also recognized as necessary for happiness, such as wealth, health, friends, and a just society in which to live.”

Our challenge is to holistically see and value all the parts of what he said, and not just pick out pieces.

Whispering Back To Power

At the rate that has been demonstrated, and the lack of concern on the part of so many, we may lose most of what was obtained by the longest and hardest struggles (see your history fellow citizens!). What rights that workers have obtained will have to be fought for long and excruciatingly all over again.

Congress is not a collection of representatives “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” but instead a club of, by, and for millionaires, billionaires, and corporations.  Working for, or at least compromise for, the common good, is so rare it is effectively inconsequential.  We have a one-party system with two factions, effectively controlled by a five letter word, MONEY.

A system that, on its present path, cannot deliver the one thing that the most extensive worldwide polling ever done has revealed is the most ardent desire of the present-day adult the world over:

A good paying (livable wage) job.  The very thing that this corporatist, maximum short-term profit, world system is least capable (and least desirous) of delivering.  And because the system doesn’t do that most foundational thing it NEEDS to do, nearly every other problem we have cascades into near insolvability.  The system is on track to so monumentally under-deliver, it doesn’t take a soothsayer to see the problems coming at us.

And yet we keep thinking the “magical market”—yes, the twisted, manipulated, corporate-and-plutocrat-controlled “free market”—is somehow going to deliver for us what we desperately need.  But it is the same system whispering its continuous barrage of weakening diversion and subjugation: “Embrace The Illusion.”

Boy, do we need a lot of people to, with quiet but firm determination, whisper back: “Not Me.”