To put it lightly, happy new years
We are not going to sugarcoat this message. We are living through a tumultuous time and it is inappropriate to soften the edge. While you are sitting there enjoying your New Year’s meal, and your drinks, watching your children, dealing with your family, and anxious about what the next year will bring, children are suffering, starving, and dying all over the world–and not just the children. From Gaza to Sudan, from North to South, and right in our homes, the world as we’ve known it is revealed as toxic even while it collapses all around us. The world as it is in bad shape at all levels. It is broken and soon to be shattered. No amount of New Year’s cheer is going to change the fact that our species faces extinction. The system that keeps us ripping and raping the environment, destroying our communities, and harming our relations is going to collapse life as we know it, and what follows will be incomprehensible. Up until now, it’s been a slow boil; fast enough to observe, but slow enough to ignore. “Collapse,” just not right away–slowly, daintily, by flood, famine, disease, and starvation. Unless we change, basic goods, then the staples, will slowly disappear. The climate will continue to change, even more dramatically. The sound of birds and insects will disappear for new generations and new disasters, somehow all more record-breaking, will throw mark after mark on our affections. It is already happening, this is the truth, and most of us know it at some level. Of course, the likelihood that humanity itself dies out is low; a few will survive on their private island, their safe havens on stolen Indigenous lands and bunkers in the desert–they will live, or so their faith tells them–for after all, they are the “chosen.”
But let’s be real. There are no chosen ones here and money will not buy an escape. In the end, it will be the same for all of us. If we don’t change right now, we will suffer, we will die, and it will not be pretty.
So is there no hope?
Should we all become dejected, drink away our days, take chemical concoctions to dull the senses?
Should we make our mark and then crawl around as scavengers till the end?
Should we have one last big party before the lights go out?
No. There is still time to save the planet. As the Beatles said, we’ll get by with a little help from our friends. But, we have to make the right choice and that choice is simple. Either we learn to care about things other than ourselves, or we don’t. Either we learn to act in the interests of others and this planet, or not. If we make the right choice, if we stop entertaining outdated archetypes, institutions, and societal structures that have facilitated the destructive exploitation of this planet and its people, then we can save ourselves. Salvation starts with this choice. Learn to care, or don’t.
Of course, it is not really a choice because there’s really only one way forward. If we don’t put aside our narcissistic ways and childish conceptions we’re done and we’ll fade into historical dust. This planet might recover, long after we’ve gone But we won’t. Jeff and Bill and Elon will not make it to Mars and our societies will fade, inches from the finishing line. If you can believe the dim archetypal memories that poke through from time to time, it’s happened before. There’s no reason to think it can’t happen again.
So there it is.
This year, while you are thinking about the Turkey and the Pig and Cow that lie dead on your table and how good they are going to taste in your belly, and while you are anticipating all the meaningless little bits and bobbles you will collect over the course of this next year, with zero regards for the environmental cost or the genocides occurring right now, and while you are gobbling down yet another piece of pie while people in your own city go hungry and homeless in this endless consumer gorge that we call “society,” make the right choice and join us. Stop thinking only about yourself and start thinking only (or at least primarily) about the world around you (the bugs, the bees, the wasps, the trees, the cats, the dogs, the cows, the pigs, the environment, the kids, and everything else) and how to make the world better for all them. We’re not talking about perfection here, at least not right away. We’re only talking about better. We see a new Earth filled with beautiful people making humanity work,
It does not require a degree in rocket science.
It is easy.
A simple decision and a little effort that all starts with you.