Announcing our doom and damnation? That’s as American as apple pie. We tell pollsters we believe in ghosts, angels and the Second Coming. The current style of apocalypses dates from the days of Jesus’ death 2000 years ago. The rapture was supposed to be hours away.
We have a schizophrenic feeling about water. We grow up with the loving mysterious frame of the blue lakes, of fluffy clouds and sunsets over oceans. Our youthful baptism grows into swimming and then into honeymooning on a white sand beach. We love water near us – how it seems to hold life in it.
Something broad and deep about human nature is deleted now. The evolution of fight or flight has been reversed, apparently. The most obvious crime, call it the Willful Ending of Life, is world-wide in its scale. Yet someone has persuaded us that reports of the earth’s death are greatly exaggerated. We listen for some message from the silent nation-states, religions, corporations, armies.
Wikileaks is a democratic media outlet as is no other. It releases documents and awakens the masses to many a hidden agenda and crime by the institutions we place trust in. The people with power in this country are covering up this release and their influence now stretches towards the corporations.
“The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.” ~Herbert Marcuse
It’s good that strip-mining, tar sands, hydro-fracking, oil spilling – this flood of nightmares is scaring us silly. We’re getting that energy extraction has consequences on this earth. What could be more important than that? But our public discussion doesn’t go to the inevitable political change that is on the horizon.
I am reading here at the library considering these last hours of community service as a computer aid. I really dont have to do much, the librarians are just glad they can pawn off the redundant questions to me, the aid. I have all the patience in the world at their disposal. I find it facinating that one can look at a gmail sign up page and see walls of towering stone.
Glorious, sparkling waterfalls. Clear blue water. The hot sun is beating down on my UV-desperate back. The children are giggling and splashing each other. I pull out my book, ready to dive into the next climactic chapter. Is this paradise?
But then . . . I hear C&C Music Factory blaring over the speakers. Reality kicks in.
You'd think that things like disasters, or the purity of childhood, or even milk, let alone water or air, would be sacred. But no. Corporations have no built-in limits on what, who, or how much they can exploit for profit. In the fifteenth century, the enclosure movement began to put fences around public grazing lands so that they might be privately owned and exploited.
"Banish the word 'struggle' from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we have been waiting for." — Hopi elders
