On the Brink

We live just outside Seattle in the fifteenth year of the new millennium. Ours is now one of the most prosperous and most well educated cities on Earth. Even so this comes at a great cost. Housing is in high demand and short supply. The haves have more wealth than is fathomable by most. The have nots grow in exponentially disproportionate numbers daily. Seattle outgrew its transportation infrastructure in the middle of last century.

Our climate appears to be rapidly changing. We just had the driest, warmest winter I can remember since 1981. More so, we just had the hottest, driest June and July months in our recorded history and the state's largest-ever wildfire. I look out at our hazy skies and remember a time when they were so clear and blue they almost resembled some brilliant fantasy illusion. Now the illusion is people’s understanding our natural environment is healthy and we can continue living out our current “civilized” course in perpetuity.

As sons and daughters of the Great Depression, our grandparents’ generation wanted to give our parents everything they never had and more, much more. After their second attempt to destroy Earth by means of war, they set out to conquer our world another way and serve it up to our parents on a fine crafted platter forged from Mexican mined silver. And so began the dawn of the modern, atomic and automated age …

The path to hell is paved with good intentions. I have to wonder whether our grandparents’ generation was that naïve to squander our world’s resources without pondering the consequence of their actions. Or did they have more intention behind their actions than we may now realize?

Our parents gladly accepted the gifts their parents gave them. For a time we gladly accepted the gifts our parents gave us. Some time along the way we began to see the signs of our misguided path. Illnesses; marred landscapes; loss of species. The list goes on.

With all of our wizardrous advancements in knowledge and technology, one would think we could once and for all solve the greatest problems in our world. And what if one day all of us suddenly awakened to the fact we are our own greatest problem? What then? How do we solve ourselves?

Those who lead us tell us they care about us and our interests. They are divided into two camps. The first camp insists we stay the course of resource squandering. They act to further divide the masses with in fighting about the ways in which we are different and they most ironically refer to themselves as conservatives.

The second camp understands as well as attempts in some ways to resolve our adverse impact on our world. They perpetuate the “us vs. them” in fighting among the masses through attempts to legislate basic human decency and they are called liberals. Both camps are manipulated by the most egregious of our world’s offenders, mega corporations, and both camps kneel to these entities in the name of their own self-interests, which are opposed to the Earth’s as well as the masses’.

To be clear, Earth is a perfectly designed, complex network of interdependent organisms which cohabitate in a delicate balance both at the benefit and detriment of one another. For life to flourish, death must initiate a new cycle.

Our world is wonderous, miraculous and spectacular. Humans are as well, to a point, perfect as their deepest flaw. We humans play upon this Earth like toddlers in a sandbox, digging around carelessly as if the box could never empty of sand while we build and destroy to our heart’s content. And when the sands run out, so too shall we.