variations on a theme

The most troubling thing about listening to the politicians & media spun dialogue is their seeming oblivion to the physical living breathing world out here. One would think our economy is wholly contained within ledger sheets and credit capability.

The right wing continues to rage against any admission that America’s unbridled adulation of consumption & greed (under the cloak of “free market”) has produced long term destruction; or that global warming is real & happening; or that humanity is having a vast, and harmful, impact upon the very life support systems we depend upon; or that blindly feeding the military profit machine produces more harm than good.

Maybe it’s denial? And maybe it’s not just them, maybe it’s most all of us? How many of us are guilty of ignoring what really keeps this economy afloat? For instance, do you turn on a water faucet totally disinterested in the water system & reservoirs & mountain wetlands & weather systems that made that stream of liquid life pour from your faucet? You should be interested, because there’s no guarantee that it will always be flowing.

When have we heard a politician ~ be they Democrat, Republican, Obama or an ideological dinosaur ~ discuss the fact of America’s fantastic success these past couple centuries being attributable to the cornucopia of land and resources that lay before us immigrants? Sure our ingenuity helped, but without the resources at our disposal, all the ingenuity in the world would have come to naught.

“We” have had centuries of consuming as ravenously as possible, but the party couldn’t go on forever. Our fortune is to be part of the generation of reckoning. Our kids will have to learn to live in a brave new world. Within means and learning to become true stewards of the land, focused on sustaining and enhancing. What will they make of our boast: “too much is never enough?”

Of course, productive land is dependent upon benign weather patterns. When have we experienced the media actually trying to explain what scientists are observing in our climate? Why is the media incapable of cutting through all the politically motivated spin and giving Americans a good lesson on what satellites and ground observations are actually recording?

The questions could go on. But, I think the bigger issue may be in recognizing how much ego we have invested in our particular views of the world. Both the left and the right have excellent ammunition against the other. It is too easy to ridicule the epic mistakes of each. Maybe one of the prerequisites for successfully dealing with the coming crisis is in recognizing our own mistakes, misunderstandings and blind spots. To gain a degree of humility. To appreciate that there is much to learn. To want to learn. To achieve a willingness to listen to others while suspending judgment for the moment and digesting the thoughts behind the words before returning to judgmental mode. Sounds easy, but so hard to do, yet oh so necessary.