Year After Year.
I was sitting in my car after returning from Wannaska. I was listening to MPR yet again about how hundreds of thousands of children are starving to death in Afghanistan, a country besieged by the murder of armies of humans beginning in about 500 BCE, and the senseless slaughter of its inhabitants, young and old, (also now called ‘collateral damage’) all for reasons of insanity by various factions, including the United States for 20 years. https://thediplomat.com/2017/06/why-is-afghanistan-the-graveyard-of-empires/
I’ve become quite ignorant about what has been happening around the world since I retired; having lost my twice daily serving of world news via BBC; and my follow-up inquiries of such events on the internet into the wee hours of the morning, although I’ve come to the realization that I haven’t missed much; these horrid things never change.
Armies still kill their nation’s own inhabitants; politicians still lie to their constituents; corporations exist to rule the world; the world is still under threat of total annihilation by man-made pollution and weaponry.
A few days earlier, as I was driving home from Roseau, I learned about the developing crisis in Belarus. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/12/poland-belarus-border-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-crisis. It was about, yet again, another political leader and administration, in conflict with the world, which uses the suffering of thousands of human beings as pawns to resolve its problem.
We decry the savagery in the world; yet celebrate our victories through our very participation in it; making the same mistakes, generation after generation with no end in sight, then justify our actions through the lens of historical hindsight. We kill the next generations of brilliant minds in wars, or starve them to death in refugee and concentration camps thus altering world outcomes beyond our imaginations, never realizing who might have changed the world had wars never occurred and young people never died in their senselessness.
I am not mollified by the deluge of Christmas advertising vomited from radios, computers, newspapers, and TV commercials across our country; the inflatable Santa Clauses and reindeer; the webs of electric Christmas lights outlining houses, yards, and tree branches. Everything seems so fake, so ugly; when children all over the world are starving or freezing to death somewhere, year after year.
What am I doing about it?
Near the beginning of A Christmas Carol, the ghost of Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s old business partner visits Scrooge.
ReplyDeleteScrooge is terrified and tries to put Marley off by telling him he was always a good man of business.
Marley angrily rattles his chains made up of his lifetime sins and says, “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
You my friend are doing your part in this ugly beautiful world.
I agree with the Chairman. This morning on NPR, there was a piece about what we can do as individuals to "do our part" in the rapid - so large it is hard to see - world of our individual actions. Here are some suggestions:
ReplyDelete1. Downsize your house or other living spaces - size = more energy used
2. Manage heating, cooling, LED bulbs, and so forth. Open the window for ventilation and cooling. Put on an extra sweater and use another blanket in cold weather.
3. Go solar if you can. If that is not afforadable right now, do your best to buy power from a source that invests in solar, wind, even geothermal.
4. Buy an electric vehicle, if you can afford it right now. Prices are coming down over the long-run and charging stations are on the rise.
All in the interest of reducing your carbon footprint on this beautiful, endangered home. You may even find yourself making a profit on your energy needs by selling your excess solar "fuel" to the grid - from your solar array.
We can do it. If there are enough of us, we can even take down the greatest footprints. Call me an Environmental Pollyann. It's against my usual pessimism. If I think and act any other way, I'll fall down and curl up in a flower garden in a Forest.