September 23, 2016
All is well in the natural world, where no black birds have been shot by bird police, where flocks of pelicans swirl on the river and no pelican police stop their fellows’ peaceful assembling, where butterflies flip-wing and no butterfly police arrest them for flying without a license. Where color is flippant, bursting, boastful, brandished, worshipped in the Church of Nature.
The hell, the chaos, the fear, the hate: belongs to us alone, a single species. Please explain.
Please explain our instinct to tame, to bulldoze, to cut down, to possess, to grow out until we run out of land – we, the most invasive of species – and destroy our fellow humans, our literal relatives (ourselves) over mere dye hues of melanin, over culture.
Ultimately, we are killing ourselves. Please explain that.
Research in the great libraries. You will find no evidence of policing of insects, no courts of law for small mammals, no Ten Commandments or Thou shalt nots, for trees.
There is no unfettered Nature left, no wild and unseen secret glade or forest or cave – we have seen to that – and now we “manage” that which is greater than ourselves yet we do not manage or control ourselves. Explain, please.
God “made” Man in His own image. A man wrote that down. A man taught me that. A man immersed me in water, saving me. From what? Trees? Flowers? Clouds? Mountainscapes? Rivers? Rain?
From whom? Men.
Nature is for exploitation, for the sole use of Men, and Men need saving from themselves, so: Buddha, Yaweh, Jesus, Great Spirit, save us from us. We are utterly incapable of stopping our own destruction. We have no idea how to love, how to “consider the lilies of the field.”
On a four-billion-year old planet, two hundred thousand years ago on a plain in Africa, apes stood on two feet and evolved to us. We started raping the planet right then and there. We moved out of Africa and raped every natural place we encountered, and we raped our own people. Please explain this to the Martians.
So here we are.
Still, pelicans endure. Butterflies migrate with no knowledge or fear of extinction. Trees still stand, still shade. All are confined, all managed, all dependent on us. Until humans go extinct and architecture is trumped by trumpet vine and rocks of ages.
We currently are worried about a charlatan Republican and a terribly flawed Democrat. Why? They’re people. They are us. Why are we surprised? The Prophet Pogo predicted this outcome long ago.
If you want change, vote for Wolf. Elect Viper. Choose Stream. Opt for Prairie. Or: Poison Wolf, eradicate Viper, pollute Stream, cut down Prairie.
Oh wait, we’re already doing that.
Please explain.
