The verdict is in…
Well, the jury’s come back in with a verdict and found the defendants guilty on both counts. Who is on trial?
We are.
The first crime we have been charged with is the systematic destruction of nature out of individual greed, and the resulting loss of community. The second crime we are accused of is grand theft consumption by the developed world of a billion people consuming thirty-two times the resources used by the other five billion human beings sharing this planet. If we are to continue at this rate, it’s estimated we’d need another four planets. Which – need it be said? – we don’t have. Our property is obviously more important than the lives of those five billion people.
The bill of particulars on the first count included global warming, the ozone hole, the destruction of standing forests, the poisoning of the water, the air, the soil, the loss of over two hundred species every day, the dead zones in the overfished seas, the dying of the coral reefs, and on and on.
So the question is: will our culture, our civilization, undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living? We’ve become consumers: no longer citizens of a shared community. “Shop, shop, shop ’til you drop” is the answer given by our leaders, and surveys show we – as a population – are less happy, less fulfilled than surveys showed fifty years ago. Can we really give up overconsumption? Do we want to? No, we will not voluntarily give up our unsustainable way of life.
Do we need to? Yes.
Which leads us to the question: is violence a justified answer the second crime of theft? Will we result to violence when the population escalates from six and a half billion to ten billion people by 2050? Is that when people will finally wake up and realize how they have been violated and exploited? What about our democracy? It’s all about economics, the needs of the natural world taking a back seat to the needs of the economic machine. So the culture is driven by quarterly profits and bi-annual election cycles.
We individuals can recycle, change light bulbs, get a hybrid car if we can afford it, but that won’t turn it around. It’s a question of leadership. It’s John F. Kennedy who said “we’re going to the moon” and then took action and committed the resources and support of the entire country to this effort. So who today of these candidates is ready to lead? Ready to lead us to a sustainable way of life and answer the question of social justice? Time is growing short, and the last seven years have been lost as those in power have denied that there is a threat, or at least seen that the cost to economic interests is too great to merit a strong commitment to solutions. I say vote, but make sure you vote for who you think will make a difference…and when you do let me know, because I haven’t found them yet.
Be Bop!
Thom McFadden
