Raison D’Etre
Bright green grass is pushing its way up through the colorless stalks of what bloomed last spring. The two-and-a-half inches of rain we had on the first is having its effect, albeit somewhat prematurely, according to the calendar. Or so we might opine, when we forget about the timelessness of the system in which we find ourselves. Nature is an amazing mother.
Consider fifteen billion years since the Big Bang. Five billion years of Earth. A million years or so of human beings. A few thousand years of creative intellect. A few hundred years of modern development. We have now learned how extinguish all life on Earth, and have squandered a quarter of our production over the last fifty years on its implementation. Were we slip and explode the weapons, and toast the top of the land masses, Nature would come back. Even the pessimists project that the worst nuclear disaster would detoxify in 500,000 years.
The same jeopardy results from our every-day approach to life on this planet. If we are not ready to blow ourselves up deliberately in one fell swoop, we are pouring toxics into the air, water, and land all times. We are over-planting the land, and we are over-fishing the oceans. The population increases unchecked, and we continue to install decision-makers whose priorities are determined by short-term financial gains for their supporters.
For most of my adult life, I have struggled with the discrepancy between what we say and what we are doing — who we say we are as a people; what our moral leaders describe as our purpose and direction — and the stark realities of our daily lives. Over the past thirty years, I’ve encountered an increasing number of people who are incompetent, unwilling to make an effort, or are outright liars and crooks. Whereas as once I thought that everyone shared the goal of what was right and good and honorable, today few even pay the notion lip service.
That said, as I close out my first half-century on this dear planet Earth, I am optimistic that the dark clouds will soon part, and the light will shine through again. It doesn’t make sense to me that 15 billion years of hard work would just fizzle into a mire of carnage and despair. What makes more sense is that we arrive at what Einstein called "a new way of thinking".
A new way of thinking, as in getting the population down to the right number, eliminating all weapons of mass destruction so they can’t be detonated even by mistake, cleaning up our messes and restoring the environment, and shifting to solar energy systems. Why does that seem ridiculous, out of reach now? It didn’t not so long ago.
My guess is that we are engaged in a final mythic struggle of some sort. That we are in the process of shedding the old way of thinking that life is struggle and nature to be tamed. That we have developed the technologies to live lightly on the Earth, and now it is time to take the next step — to learn what we are truly capable of, and what is our individual purpose in being here.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.