Sinking in Our Stupidity

Every once in a while I feel a need to reiterate how dumbly humans have populated and spread over the planet. To maintain our burgeoning billions, we rely on brute tactics, like massive aqueducts that drain ancient paisleys of lakes and rivers, and unruly technologies with massive side-effects and risky ramifications.

In the midst of our breeding, guzzling, and competing to grab rings of gold on carousels of envy, most of it pomp and illusion, we fail--somehow--to take notice of how radically the Earth has changed over the course of a terribly brief time-span. Take Los Angeles. It didn’t exist much at all a hundred years ago. Yesterday, I flew in on a jet plane, a kind of vehicle that didn’t exist sixty years ago, and saw lattices of electricity stretching to fill plains as far as the eye could see.

Grizzly bears, wolves, deer and condors recently roamed these sage-peppered plains. Oops, they're not sage-peppered anymore. Can you say, “crammed cubic domiciles” many millions of times very fast?

And yet the entire Republican party, perhaps 50% of the Empire, shrugs as the polar icecaps melt, seas rise and ecosystems mutate. “We didn’t cause it,” they proclaim in numb counterpoint to the plethora of evidence that has convinced the scientific community otherwise. Make no mistake, this isn’t a slim majority of scientists. Around 97% believe humans are the main factor in pushing global warming along:

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/06/scientists-overwhelmingly-believe-in-man-made-climate-change/1

With vigorous selfishness, we have incredibly and colossally altered the atmosphere of a 25,000-mile-circumference sphere. And yet most of us are ho-hum about it. We can’t be bothered with global issues, even if they are destroying the health of the globe itself.

We have business to attend to! Oh, and we have to raise our children so they can breed more people with more needs. And we might play video games on the side, maybe the ever-popular Angry Birds on our Ipod. When the Ipod rings, we dutifully stick it up next to our ear, rolling the dice with brain cancer.

Of course, a great chunk of the citizenry is in psychological denial or more concerned with making money by pandering to oil companies. These folks actively work to undermine progress in any way they can: smear campaigns, bribery, dissimulation.

As we infest and infect Gaea in disgusting and dangerous ways, not to mention the mutilation of great divine beauty, and the wanton torment inflicted on any animal nonhuman that gets in our way, or just looks fun to exploit, it becomes increasing obvious that we are as urge-driven as mice in a food bin.

We swill and battle for the goodies, keeping other mice at bay or shutting them out entirely so they starve. Meanwhile the food supplies dwindle, the bin fills with our shit, and yet we chow on and on, hating each other more and more.

When it all collapses, we have only our own pathetic and detestable selves to blame--but especially those who are in denial, do nothing, or who fight against reform with anger, propaganda and fear.