Just Fix The Planet

The ages have taught humanity, and we have learned well, how to deal with the consequences of our nature. And they are manifest in the stories and legends, in the fables and sacred texts, in the shared wisdom of our heritage. We know the virtues of heroism and we reward them. We know the vices of villainy and we punish them. When we pay respect to the wisdom of the ages we can expect justice and social amity, but this is not what we pay attention to in our contemporary American society.

 

What we pay attention to is the monetization of every possible aggregation of interest with nihilistic abandon. We say that infinite freedom exists and that we can be free of judgment. We say that anything goes because everything can be socialized into normalcy and we say that nothing outside of our experience need concern us because there is no standard against which we must conform.

 

So our self-discipline is narrowed to those few things we have decided to be in our individual interests. We pursue our passions. We champion our favorite pet charity or marginalized group. We sell propaganda for our favorite political provocateur or interest group. We consume our favorite flavors.

 

We ignore the commons. We ignore wisdom. We feel something is wrong. We blame others. We expect disaster. We watch zombie movies. We anticipate a great famine, a global holocaust, a Biblical reckoning. We panic and strive to get our last licks in, to cash in while there's still cash to cache. We are thoughtless, juvenile herds, like a swam of seagulls picking through a garbage heap with no higher self-regard than is absolutely necessary in our endless scrapping for scraps. The best thing we can hope to be is a sentimental favorite victim. Oh look at how I suffer. Squawk! Squawk! Where is my piece of this pile of garbage? Squawk!

 

Is it any wonder we kill ourselves? We have engineered our psyches into engines of self-destruction. We rightly hate what we have become, and yet we refuse to give up the game we have been convinced is the only game in town. Because everybody we know is playing, and so what about history? History is a story of oppression, and suffering we say. And so we have been convinced that our material affluence and comfort demand that we follow an arrow of behaviors that inevitably tell us to abandon the very idea of having many children. This is the way of prosperity, we tell ourselves. This is the way of maximizing individual freedom. This is the way of avoiding pain and suffering. And yet we still want to be rock stars, validated by the millions and under no obligations to something so pedestrian as a family, a religion, a nation. With no need to conform to any convention of chastity, of sobriety, or reserve our mantra instead is the direct opposite. Sex! Drugs! Rock & Roll!. We smash our guitars. We get smashed. We leap into the air and expect the adulation of the millions will bear us up. We sing our desperate songs of self to a million other selves who stare up at images of us in our lonely, adolescent cells. We feel stupid, and contagious, here we are now, entertain us. The game of life is hard to play, we're going to lose it anyway. Suicide is painless.

 

But it's not us. It's the guns. Just change that part of the planet and we can go on doing what we want. It's not us. It's the opioids. Just change that part of the planet and we can go on doing what we want. It's not us. It's the immigrants. Just change that part of the planet and we can go on doing what we want. It's not us. It's ChickFilA, it's the people who eat meat. It's the people who don't sex like we do. It's not us. JUST FIX THE PLANET.

 

Who is going to give us the power to fix the planet? Because it's not us.