Heavy Lifting in Tomorrow Land

 

        You can understand if they, anyone under 30, want to toss us over. We have certainly handicapped their future. 

    You can understand why we might want to toss over some of us. We, collectively humankind, have blown it, in more ways than we care to enumerate. 

    Some of us began with concern and then warnings. Some of us heard the siren and began fumbling toward correction. Some of us nailed down the science and heightened the alarm. Some of us got more serious, more ardent, more engaged and it is precisely there, on this front line between knowledge and action where "we" became frayed and then  undone. We became a DMZ between foresight and negligence, between us and them,  though we are all players in the dirty deal. 

    The planet had science, and then big money bought some of it. When scientists told an oil company decades ago fossil fuels were killing the planet and that meant ocean levels were rising, they decided to raise the level of their drilling platforms and keep the dark secret as a gift for their descendants. 

    The UN Red Warning for Planet Earth confirms what we had been told, tells us it is worse than we knew, and it is an indictment for all of us. We are all guilty of this crime; those of us who worried about the science and tried to make changes, those of us who knew the science and kept on doing business as normal, those of us who "knew in our hearts" we were doing a slow motion dance with death but still relied on legal and political means to make change, and those of us who put wealth and profit above all else! The power was in the big money and they bought lobbyists and congressmen and senators and wrote laws that were phony and ineffective.

        Edward Abbey, like all of us, was flawed, but he spoke truths and is a godfather of a strain of environmental awareness also known as Eco-Warriors. 

        He said, "sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."

        There's been a lot of that. 

        

        We have done an accounting and learn we value money and material over the sanctity of life; ours, nature, the planet and the future. By thousands of actions we have all plundered the kid's future, a murder by a multitude of blows.

         All of that board room business and "economic cost" blather and all of the political mumbo jumbo got us to where we are. Humankind has been hoodwinked, seduced and is being undone by our greed. 

        As someone who has studied non-violence I am conflicted now, wondering if political guerrilla war fare might not have forced a better outcome, and drawn more attention to the selling of our soul. 

     Abbey wrote, "Better a cruel truth than comfortable delusion." 

      If there had been serious "monkey wrenching" we might have had more sway, more impact in protecting the future. My late brother John was a radical, a street fighter, while also an effective psychological clinician. I think now of some of our long and deep conversations. I might have better served my grand children if I would have stepped out of the neutrality of journalism and joined a fight. 

       As did others, I spent years reporting the story, even investigating environmental crimes. Our work informed, but being right and even being righteous doesn't guarantee success.

        As worthy as it might be to batch grind all of us of a certain age into dog food, I would urge the inheritors of tomorrow land to forget about old scores and instead go to work immediately in applying all knowledge and science to making adjustments, modifications, and new ways of living. Where and how you live, raise food, get water, cooperate, and even multiply will and should change. Yes, we need to stop doing damage, but you will have to make profound changes just to survive.

    Screw the profit motive. Find a way to value the totality of all human life. Nation's divide and create barriers including to solutions. The planet makes you all kindred, regardless of old power structures. Bridge and then diminish them. Be exhaustingly careful where you put your trust. Don't let money pimp science. Put cooperation and communitarian objectives into problem solving. Depose political and royal kings, queens, potentates, war lords, strongmen and those who rule or possess power because money bought it or made it happen. If money rules, life loses. Classism will only complicate the enormous challenges you will face.

     We fly computers into the heavens, rich men ride rockets for fun, but we can't house, feed or medicate people and we continue to poison our home. You in tomorrow land need to find better ways. 

       A few years ago some of us thought we could fix and make better. We failed, especially on the big matters.

        

        For those of us who will not venture deep into tomorrow land, let's get out of the way and for once begin to act in something other than our own selfish interests. Let's behave as though there is a future that has a value that exceeds our materialistic cult and age. Let's pray for the well being of future generations.    

        For those of you who will inhabit tomorrow land, respect the science, respect life, respect each other and do good, for the sake of everything.

        See you down the trail. 

  

Is he the future?

   In a striking way, Dr. Stephen Hawking may have been the first of the new breed of human being. He charted new horizons and boundaries in science and left an intellectual imprint that is among the giants of all bipeds who have inhabited this terrestrial ball. He did it of course despite a body that was betrayed by a disease. 
   It was the brain and the spirit of Hawking that lived while his body barely did. That he defied the odds of his demise for a half a century is in itself extraordinary, then we are left stunned by the output of his life, mind stretching output. Hawking defined the point of a human life. The intellect and what we do with it. All of our bodies will fail eventually, either by age or disease and the sum of our existence will derive from the output of our brain and our spirit. What did we do?
    Wealth, fame, athletic accomplishment last for only so long, no manner how grand they may be. Hawking shows us that human spirit and the mind is unlimited.
     Who knows what awaits human kind as we continue to poison and despoil our planet, as disease, famine, and war, continue to threaten as they have through all of history, or as we surrender our mental health to screens, entertainment, commercialization and when materialism erodes spirituality and intellectuality. Regardless of any or of all of the above, Hawking demonstrates true human potential resides in that unique link between the on board human computer-the brain and our uniquely human essence, the spirit. 
      It may be that our progeny will live more as brains, human computers, cyborg fused connections of mechanical bodies. They may live where birth right, disability, illness, are simply complications that are transcended and barely relevant to the power of mind and the capacity of our spirit.
     We are in debt to Stephen Hawking for being a great intellectual power and scientist, but also for overcoming the frailty and certain failure of physical existence by living powered by his mind and spirit. In the vernacular of our age he was the real Super Hero.

     As if we really need another indication, but the dismissal of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson by social media demonstrates the despicable nature of the person in question. It is the act of a coward, unfit and unqualified and completing lacking of character.  
     The man who occupies the oval office is as far from the standard of a good or worthy human being as we can imagine. He is as far from a Stephen Hawking as light is from dark.
     I am no less convinced of the danger he poses now than when I was first reviled by the slimy way he conducted himself in the republican primary. We had warnings from his previous life. And it was back in the election cycle that dozens of former military, state department, intelligence and political leaders took the unprecedented action of warning the public about him.
    Though he is perhaps the most reviled and unpopular president in history, he has defenders, still.  And so on this day when we mourn Stephen Hawking, the president is a kind of litmus test or bell weather of how far down the road of selfishness, greed, depravity, lack of knowledge and stupidity this nation has stumbled. That is why the extraordinary life of Stephen Hawking is such an inspirational antidote. 
     Hawking is human worthy of celebration. The president is a low life hustler worthy of our contempt. Let's close with one of the president's main stream media friends-of course it's tabloid, just like him.

     Sorry, but we can't accept this regime as normal. It remains a danger to the republic. 

      See you down the trail.

AFTER THE SUN & PLANET TEARS

TWILIGHT COLORS

Once the grandiloquence of 

the sun's evening departure is fixed

in our mind, in the hour of 

myth and dreams, the land becomes a 

subtle scape of texture and hues.

The summit of the pass over the Santa Lucia range is a portal.

 A place of exquisite subtlety.

HISTORY WILL CARRY THE VERDICT

Imagine December 2111.  Is it possible that humankind

will look back to us and say we had a choice between

money and life and we chose money?  Children born

between now and the next 10 years will be the elders of that humankind.  What will they endure, because of our

devotion to economic structure as we know it instead

of care for the planet?

I don't believe our science, as good as it is, fully understands the continual changes, shifts and evolutionary forces at work on our blue planet. But some of the maladies are man made.  Poisons in rivers, lakes and oceans. 

Trash and debris that takes generations to degrade and 

often leaves an altered earth and water supply behind.  Global climate changes may not all be man made, but there are apocalyptic warnings about changing temperatures, animal and insect migration changes, extreme weather changes.  It is also undeniable that carbon emissions are rising. Maybe they don't matter. But what if they do?

10 Thousand government ministers and experts from 194 nations are meeting in Durbin for a conference on our 

planet's future. From the most rational and reluctant to the most strident, there is a consensus things are changing

and those changes will force biological and botanical  reactive change.  How we live will change, in ways 

we can only speculate.

But, because the planet is gripped by economic fear,

there will be no agenda, no plan of action, no

muscle to try to change the course we are on.

Socialist, Capitalist, Communist, Feudal, Tribal-

no matter how the nations of the world practice

economics, this age is too wed to evaluating

life and human endeavor by those standards to 

instead put a value on the life of the planet we

inhabit or the lives of our descendants.

December 2111.  Will they regret the choices 

we have made?

See you down the trail.