Happy Earth Day -- The Earth is for All People

All people in all places deserve clean water, clean air, and un-contaminated soil, in order to live a healthy existence -- just as much as the animals with whom we share this planet deserve such necessities.  If trees and animals are people too, then every member of the human species should also be treated as a real person. Otherwise the structure of the argument fails.  If we treat our fellow humans foully, how can anyone expect us to respect and heal other living things on this planet?  But our minds are what make us human, and not merely like all other living things.  The human intellect is the inevitable result of natural, ecological development.  It is a part of the natural order.  More importantly, it has successfully lived in harmony with nature for 99% of the time it has been cranially present in the hominid family, fully emerging into wakefulness anywhere from 70,000 to 50,000 years ago, depending on what evidence you examine and which anthropologist you talk to.  Our present disharmony with Nature should not be blamed on the cerebral potential of the human species, but on society's political misguidance, on its dry-rot of despiritualization.

There are libertarians who would say we should blame environmental degradation on the ignorance and carelessness of the poor, while liberal progressives would blame it on the insouciant economic methodologies of the rich.  Rational minds will recognize that overpopulation is of vital concern, but birth control education, supplies and clinics are being stymied by right-wing religious lobbies and traditional male chauvinist tribal societies -- and within the United States, by legislators, judges and even pharmacists!  Here is the usual prescription for the Earth Crisis: recycle, reuse, eat no or less red meat, buy local produce, use less electricity, reproduce fewer children, walk or ride a bike instead of a car if you can, don't buy that malfunction-prone cheap garbage from slave-factories in Asia, press your political leaders and candidates to restrain extractive industries that produce greenhouse gases, demand that corporations actually develop systemic forms of green energy.  These are all helpful and constructive, but the rich and powerful hold the true keys, and they are stubborn.

Not only that, they purposely mislead the less informed to believe that environmental concerns are a hoax and that defenders of our biosphere are anti-business, anti-capitalist, even eco-terrorists.  All of this anti-green skullduggery is so frustrating that sometimes the imagination could lead one to wonder sometimes if there are not pod-people inhabiting the bodies of humans to efficiently orchestrate the disintegration of our world from within.  If it were a matter of mere ignorance, that would be one thing.  But when it is so willful and cannily informed in its destructive nature, its reflexive shirking of all positive alternatives, it seems diabolical.  Earth is all we have, and if there is a Congress of Intelligent Life in the Universe (which I think not unlikely), they are probably now awarding us a resounding "D-" in ecological stewardship.  And what are the powerful going to do with their piles of wealth and booty when the Earth has become a desert? Take a silver spaceship to a secret resort on Planet X and clink bubbling champaign glasses?

I apologize for being so negative, but I know there are probably plenty of more hopeful sites out there in there on the internet to celebrate this day.  I just want us to squarely face certain aspects of the problem of potential environmental collapse that I have grown sick of the mainstream media dancing around.  Did not Nero play his lyre while Rome burned at the hands of his paid arsonists?  And then he blamed a scape-goat.  The planet burns now -- have we learned nothing?

The Hubris of the American Aristocracy

The presumptions and insouciant arrogance of the political conservatives of America is nothing short of dumbfounding, We are talking now about a degree of self-arrogation that has achieved true hubris. They actually believe they can rewrite Western Civilization. They mistake the middle and working classes for having a short memory, they we have already been conditioned to accept serfdom. They forget that we all can look back on over seven hundred years of steady progress since the Black Plague failed to subdue the human spirit, and that we can all appreciate the past over two hundred years of democratic and economic progress of relentless, broadening social enfranchisement. There is no turning back for our psyches. You can create the most desperate economic situations using the slave labor of Asia, but we will not let go of our sense that we are entitled as members of a democracy to decent employment and human welfare. You can turn a state like Wisconsin into an autocracy and fire our legally elected officials and replace them with gubernatorially-appointed flunkies, and we will not fail to forget that the Constitution says we are entitled to a democracy. You can try to subvert popular sovereignty, and we will not forget that you transgress gravely upon the very fundamental reasons the United States of America was created in the first place. The rich are not entitled to trounce on the liberties and political participation of the common people. We have not forgotten our inalienable rights, and we know you are violating our Constitution. We know you are making our Founding Fathers roll in their graves, and we know you will pay for your transgressions. You bring suffering to us, curtailment of our freedoms and ability to participate in the economy of life. This goes against the basic principles of ethical society, and for those of us of religious belief, we see it as against the Will of God. You are cynical, and firm in your silent belief that you may do as you will without fear of Divine retaliation, or that we will meekly submit to your re-establishment of the bane of Modernity: serfdom for those you deem not as fully human as yourselves. Shame on you! How could you do this to a country that once gave hope and inspiration to the world?!  Shame on you for not being content with already an embarrassment of wealth and influence. Have you no conscience? Are you a class of sociopaths? Have you no imagination of what good your wealth could do for human civilization? If you would but constructively share but a fraction of it for the enrichment and rebuilding our once great society, what wonders might be wrought! Was it merely the Cold War that kept you within the moral fold? Now that there is no Soviet Threat. you sell us all like slaves down the river, because there is no more a powerful rival to shame you for your ill treatment of your own nation. China you have befriended as though they were the most venerable capitalists, but the affinity is nothing to do with Communist China discovering the virtues of capitalism. You are autocratic in will, and China has mastered autocracy to the most methodical degree. You are natural allies against true democracy. The challenge of the future is awesome enough with Climate Change threatening to turn our Earth into another planet Mars, and yet you set your most energetic will upon the destruction of democracy. Democracy is the one political mechanism that has any hope of solving the survival of our human species and the other biological organisms we seem so reluctant to admit we depend upon for our survival. If you do succeed in destroying our democracy in all but name, you will have also demolished the fine instrument our wise Founding Fathers created that might have saved us from this pressing ecological dilemma. If the ideology of greed triumphs, our species, both rich and poor, will find itself buried in a mass grave created by the cumulative blowing dust of Time, rather than the pitying hand of a human (and humane) gravedigger.