"24 hours of Climate Reality" is happening right now.
I have watched and watched trying to get the messages to stay in my brain. I am angered by the people we have allowed to lead us, politically and socially, angered by their greed, self interest, vanity. Their stupidity is insulting, or it would be, if we weren't even more stupid by taking their words as truthful and wise.
Even with out the threat of a changing climate, our world has become a discount shopping store with a blue light special going on at every mountain top, river, oil deposit, gas reserve, ocean, and forest. The large corporations are the sale crazed shoppers that trample the slower moving people to get to what is left to buy. They tear at the goods, ripping them from the hands of who ever was there first. They leave the place a mess when they move on to the next aisle and flashing light. The governments of our countries are the store managers who keep putting up the blue lights and announcing the next sale. Your children are not safe, they will be trampled. The hoarding of resources will keep them poor and hungry and dependent on others. We have reason to be angry, reason to revolt, reason to change just in the manner that the way the earth, our home, is being treated right now. The news says a lot about other possible earths out there, about technology that will answer all our need, all the while we shit where we eat. We foul our world and call it progress, call it a better world. It is a childish perspective, an irreverent point of view, a short sightedness that makes us seem unintelligent, when we pride ourselves on our evolution of intelligence. We are becoming the joke that we laughed at. Have you seen the movie "Idiocracy"? If it weren't so sad, and true, it would be funny.
When we seek only to serve or save or further our individual selves, we fail to admit our real situation. In the end we all die and before that we will all suffer.
If we choose to endeavor to serve our collective selves, our race, our ecosystems, our planetary whole, we can affect in a lasting matter, whether it is our children or the offspring of all living things.
If your neighbors house burns, your house too is threatened. Your neighborhood is now blighted by the destruction. We cannot live only for our own selfish advancement, and expect the suffering of those around us not to affect us. We are all connected.
The crime and economic suffering of the countries next to us (in America this would mean Mexico) affects us. It is in our own best interest that we all help each other and look forward in order to create a sustainable and improving future for us all.
The following is an excerpt from an email I wrote to a friend today.
........In truth, I feel beaten. My hope is pretty much gone for the human race to rise up and realize that the direction we have let society travel in,( the excess, the greed...) is not only self destructive, but also self defeating. We have given those who would stand on our necks the boots they wear. I have become hopeful that the hurricanes will get stronger and more frequent, that the droughts will be more sustained, that the floods will be more widespread. I have come to believe that this will be the only way that might make people rise up and wrestle the planet back from the large corporations and the governments that are polluting, destroying the planet and a decent human life.
Life is resilient. Humans when compared to other life forms are weak, but invasive. We have done a bit to influence the systems of the planet, but I think what we might have done is to "wake up the giant". We aren't getting a Hollywood movie version that takes place in 90 minutes, but a real version, that is slower but steady. You know how long it takes a tanker or barge and tug to slow to a stop or even to effect a turn. We have started somethings that can't just be turned off instantly. "Iceberg, Dead ahead". I only hope. Truthfully, I hope that the systems that don't recognize income status or political party affiliation, will clean off the virus that is human activity. Flood, drought, blizzards, hurricanes....Money will protect some, for a while from the affects, but not ultimately. Historically, humans who have been held down by the corrupt ruling classes have eventually risen up. When the water gets high enough, the tempers will rise as well. When people are hungry, they will eat the rich. When the rich wall themselves off and post armed guards to keep out the common man, the walls will be torn down, and if a hurricane helps, so be it. The climate will tax our food and economic resources to that point eventually. When the lie that is this lifestyle that we have been sold looses it's effect people will rise up, first against each other, and then against those who sold it to them in the first place.
I believe it is that bleak, and I hope that the climate/weather/economy/satellites falling out of the sky will bitch slap us hard enough to get people to snap out of there apathetic coma and make some changes in their own lives, take back control and responsibility, and hang the politicians that they trusted and who sold them and their earth to the highest bidder, from the cell phone towers, and power lines.
I think that Gandhi was keenly smart in his ability to lead people in a peaceful resistance. I think that, like his campaign to have "homespun" clothe, we could find a path by growing our own local food, developing solar and wind or geothermal power on each of our homes, driving diesel cars and making our fuel at home from vegetable oil, and many other ways. We can disempower the few but powerful greedy and the rich by no longer buying what they have to sell. But we have to be willing to loose our comfortable, overweight fat and diseased asses and take responsibility for ourselves. I don't think this will happen and I am not as adept as the Mahatma, not even close, so instead of placing my hope in the peaceful way, even though I will live it, my hope comes in the violent and painful suffering of the bulk of humanity to bring about a meaningful change in the path of humanity.
So, in some ways, to climate change I say "bring it on" , flood the world, starve the crops, make species that our food systems depend on go extinct, give us new strains of disease, WIPE THE F##KING SLATE CLEAN OF HUMANITY and start over. A few of us will survive, probably not you or I, but some will and for a time they will have fresh in their memory how we got to the horrible place we did and they might just choose a more reasonable path. But before that happens we have what we have and are left to make our choices, to decide who we are and how we will walk thru the days that we are given.
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