Leap and the Future Will Appear
“Our heroes and their narratives are an index to our character and conception of our role in the universe – Whitman’s woodchopper, gaining mythic stature through the reduction of wilderness to planks and blocks… Ahab and the Pequod furnished in the “chased bones” of their prey… Davy Crockett grinning by a mountain of 105 bear-hides; Boone, whose rifle shots are prayer and poetry, an acolyte perpetually sacrificing to his god… Set the statuesque figures and their piled trophies in motion through space and time and a more familiar landscape emerges – the whale, buffalo, and bear hunted to the verge of extinction for pleasure in killing and “scalped” for fame and profit… the buffalo meat left to rot, till acres of prairie were covered with heaps of whitening bones, and the bones then ground for fertilizer; the Indian debased, impoverished, and killed in return for his gifts; the land and its people, its “dark” people especially, economically exploited and wasted; the warfare between man and nature, between race and race, exalted as a kind of heroic ideal; the piles of wrecked and rusted cars, heaped like Tartar pyramids of death-cracked, weather-browned, rain-rotted skulls, to signify our passage through the land.”
Government leaders and the state of the Natural World reflect the consciousness of the people. When consciousness dries up, drought, corruption and war are the result.
Last week, having dinner with a friend at a restaurant, our conversation inevitably turned to politics and the upcoming elections in the U.S. We were wrestling with the sense of no longer being able to enact positive change by voting (if we ever really could or did) to establish laws and policies that protect the Natural World and vulnerable humans. Everything we thought we had attained has been dismantled.
That’s because the upcoming election isn’t a choice it’s a trap because it’s not about issues or candidates, it’s about money. (Tired of those fundraising texts yet?) As long as we participate in a system where money drives outcome, choice can’t really exist, and without choice, democracy disappears. Arms manufacturers, big pharma and chemical companies are the only winners.
Biden’s hypocrisy isn’t reassuring: American weapons killing Palestinians while we veto calls for a ceasefire as we call for a ceasefire; the Willow project, drilling for oil in pristine Alaskan back country as we promote renewables that are themselves polluting and ineffective; denial that Hunter Biden’s fling-child is one of the Biden grandchildren; reinstatement of draconian border policy and denial of visas to those who urgently need asylum to protect them from the governments we installed overthrowing the ones they had elected. So many of us worked for so many decades to attain basic environmental and social protections, only to lose everything in one prolonged, vertiginous fell swoop. You know the list: abortion and voting rights, clean water, clean air, LGBTQ protections, the end of the arms race. The list continues to grow in the dark. We don’t even know if or how the algorithm will count our votes.
The system is corrupt and so are our leaders, not to mention my favorite soap box: not a single leader on the face of the Earth is articulating a vision for a viable future for all Life. The system needs to be dismantled and remade.
For me, the poisoned environment is an overarching concern. In the May 20, 2024 issue of the New Yorker, there’s an article entitled, You Make Me Sick. It details how, for decades, 3M covered up what they knew about PFAS and PFOS, the forever chemicals that saturate the environment and lodge in our livers and umbilical cords. As the article points out, that clear, fresh water in the creek at your local park is full of them. They’re called forever chemicals because they’ll remain in that creek for millennia. It’s a desiccated consciousness that chooses profit over poison.
How did we get to this place of complacency, this gently sloping floor of lesser evils where forever chemicals aren’t even on the menu because, in fact, they’re so on the menu they’re in it - in every body because they’re in everything we eat, drink and breathe?
At the restaurant, as my friend and I bemoaned the upcoming crossroads of choice/no choice, I told her that, for the first time ever, I’ve been considering not voting at all. The argument in my head slides from Maybe I’ll vote for the least-bad candidate to Maybe I’ll write in Elizabeth Warren or Bernie to Maybe I’ll just sit this one out. The central question at this time is, How do we hasten the dismantling and repair of a broken system in a way that invites a consciousness that chooses Life over profit, reconciliation over war?
The lady from the table next to us overheard our conversation and came over to us to insist. You really must vote. We need to keep Trump out of office at all costs. We went through the obligatory back and forth: Israel and Gaza (Netanyahu is a shit politician but Hamas has to be stopped); Ukraine (a sigh and a shrug, and the background hum of factories manufacturing nuclear bombs); the Biden-Trump dilemma (We won’t survive another four years of Trump). We asked: Given the proliferation of armed conflicts and uncontrolled AI, will we survive another four years of Biden?
The woman in the restaurant looked shocked. Our conversation went something like this:
Dead children are just as dead regardless of who drops the bomb or who pulls the trigger. The homeless and starving still suffer and Earth is still under siege. We humans must stop doing it to ourselves. We must choose to behave differently toward Earth and each other.
That means we’d have to hold our leaders to a higher standard.
Yes.
We’d have to change consciousness.
Yes.
But how?
That’s the question.
Humanity would have to make an evolutionary leap.
Exactly.
