CANDLELIT CHRONICLES: HISTORIC HAUNTS

Our Only Environment_513 word count

It is said that a frog dropped into boiling water will immediately leap free, but a frog placed in lukewarm water on which the temperature is gradually increased will be unwittingly boiled to death. I truly believe such is the thinking condition of this world over the past 20 years. We've become way too accustomed-those of us who are not directly nor indirectly victims-to racial and ethnic genocide, to wars and conflicts, to “disappearances” in Central America, to atrocities like Rwanda, Bosnia, and Argentina's “Dirty War.” Any more, it's just something we see on TV, happening to somebody else-somewhere else; until American money is pledged to a Third World country, and then most of us manage to make a loud uproar, “full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”


(And then is heard no more. It is a tale


Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,


Signifying nothing.


Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28 )


http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/tomorrow-tomorrow-tomorrow





I've come to be very much afraid that this same attitude-of the frog gradually boiled-is going to be the attitude of the human population of this planet as the only planet we have is being systematically destroyed. Overpopulation, global warming, thinning of the ozone layer, intensified natural disasters, crime resulting from overpopulation (and genuine evil), and the continual destruction of the natural environment, wildlife, plant life, and destructive consumption of natural resources. And now this:





http://www.alternet.org/environment/147185/bp_censoring_media,_destroying_eviden...





A former high school classmate of mine visited the Gulf of Mexico beaches last week, and returned to report the horrendous damage to sea birds there. In a nation in which Michael Vick and others placed dogs in brutal fighting, then killed the ones who couldn't win (and later Vick was awarded by a Philadelphia organization!), a world which closes its eyes to the disappearances of thousands in Latin America, to torture of “political” prisoners (which always, just as it did in the Stalinist Soviet Union means only “those who don't agree with us”), to racial genocide, to brutal crime everywhere, is it in any way surprising that a multinational profiteer such as British Petroleum, a corporation which allegedly had been informed BEFORE the Deepwater Horizons explosion that there was danger of that very event, would hide the extent of the destruction IT has caused?





In a world of human ostriches, yes, British Petroleum can escape this with impunity. But I have to wonder: what good will oil profiteering profits-might as well call it “piracy of the environment” be in a world gone dead? When all is lost in an apocalyptic collapse-when the world indeed “goes out with a whimper, not with a bang”, when the environment is completely destroyed and life is no longer in any sense sustainable-what profits from profiteering then? What will all the lying, deviousness, media-spinning, propaganda benefit then? When there is no more life on earth? What karma carried on, when the only planet we possess is unutterably useless-not from nuclear holocaust, as we all so feared in the 1950's, but from sheer environmental collapse? What profit then?