Sensitive

Feeling a little sensitive this morning … like the emotions are a bit too close to the surface. Things are hitting me harder than usual. My morning started off with this Short movie about a grocery bagger who put his thought for the day in the customers bags. Oh yeah, he has Down’s Syndrome. Nice, “we can all make a difference” stuff, but it left me all squishy.

Looking for my cynicism, to make it through the day, I read the comics. One of my favorites, The Pain, slapped me around in the artist’s statement.

I think that history will judge us unforgivingly for our heartless treatment of animals as commodities, and for the mass extinctions we’re heedlessly causing. The world’s frogs and bees are inexplicably dying off. We have driven the elephants insane with grief. I'm not suggesting that animals are as intelligent or worthy of the same legal rights as human beings, but they do have a capacity for suffering--they certainly experience pain and fear, and, I would argue, dread--and so, as beings with the capacity for empathy and compassion, we should maybe take pause at imprisoning and torturing them.

That’s as succinct a summary as I’ve ever read of my perspective on animal rights, and why I choose not to eat from the suffering-farms that produce American chicken and beef.

It may be that all the crimes of humanity for its entire history--its savage wars, the slavery and rapine and torture, the extermination of races and eradication of cultures--will pale in comparison to the ruination of the planet now being perpetrated by us. We are squandering the world’s resources on trips to the mall for more junk food and toys, heedlessly wrecking the place like drunk frat boys trashing a hotel room on spring break. Our economy is based on a model of infinite expansion; unfortunately, we live in a finite world.

That too … decent summary. As Agent Smith in The Matrix says ‘you multiply, and multiply, …’

Lately I’ve started feeling creepy every time I toss out a plastic coffee stirrer or shopping bag I bought three minutes earlier. This lifestyle of waste is starting to seem not just stupid and irresponsible but something more like sinful.

Yeah, me too, buddy. Me too.

The great task of our generation and the ones to come after us will not be defeating Islamic terrorism---I mean come one, if those penny-ante losers actually won they’d all kill each other off in fourteen days flat--it’s figuring out how to build a modern but sustainable way of life that we can pass down to our descendants. What’s called Permaculture. We do know how to do this, of course—we did it for millions of years before industrialization. (See Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael for further details.) It’s how to do it with six billion people on the planet without all of them living in squalid poverty and sickness that’s the trick. One thing we know is that we’re not all going to get to live the way we Americans have been living for the last fifty years. Which is why I don’t see Americans being the pioneers in this great societal project.

This is one reason why Bush’s great march to war is so very, very wrong. He’s wasting precious time, and convincing another generation that the best way to serve their fellow humans is by killing other humans.

I think I need to get back to Haiti, and re-connect with the parts of human life that are actually essential. Maybe I’m wasting my time around here. In fact, I’m certain of it.