There are a couple three websites that I check in on pretty much every day, sometimes more often than that if the circumstances permit (or demand!). Daily Kos is, of course, at the top of my blog list; it's bookmarked under Blogs/LWBlogs in my bookmarks list. Talking Points Memo is next, and on down through European Tribune, Billmon, Crooks & Liars, Eschaton, Street Prophets, Political Sapphire, and so on, probably pretty similar to the lists in most Kossalian cyber-droids' favorites baskets. On the "media" side the list is also pretty predictable. The New York Times, SFGate, and most of the major U.S. newspapers are represented, along with such cyber-venues as CounterPunch, AlterNet and a number of their digital brethren. But foremost among the "media" sites is Common Dreams, which for some years now has been the flagship of the left-leaning gather-upper media sites.
On Wednesday, February 22 Common Dreams included among its offerings
this piece by John Atcheson. As I am quite concerned about the oncoming climate changes and their potentially devastating effects upon all of us I tend to be drawn to articles and commentary dealing with such matters, and so I promptly clicked on the link and started reading. At first I didn't find anything I didn't already know, feedback loops, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, melting ice, krill kills. Been there, seen that. Tell me something I don't already know.
For a moment I fell into my usual response to such writings, silently calling down the wrath of heaven upon those I love to blame and feeling righteous and smug in my self-satisfaction.
But then, at the very end of the piece, came the cruncher:
Our children may forgive us the debts we're passing on to them, they may forgive us if terrorism persists, they may forgive us for waging war instead of pursuing peace, they may even forgive us for squandering the opportunity to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle. But they will spit on our bones and curse our names if we pass on a world that is barely habitable when it was in our power to prevent it.
And they will be right to do so.
I sat dumbfounded. I thought about all the children I know, some of whom are my nephews and nieces, and all of whom I love as if they truly were, and tried to imagine myself, or their parents, sitting them down, looking them in the eye and telling them that, no, there will be no world for you.
There will be no sparkling sunrises or glorious sunsets for you, only a brown foul-tasting sky that will sting your eyes and choke your breath.
There will be no lifetime of promise and abundance for you, only a hardscrabble existence full of hunger and misery.
There will be no comfort for you, only pain and suffering.
There will be no safety for you, only danger.
There will be no world for you.
How many of us could speak such truths to our children? And how many of us will turn a blind eye and assume that, when "the time comes", "someone" will "do something" about it?
And who will be this "someone"?
In the last few years, as the imminent environmental crisis looms on the horizon, I've often thought about Carl Sagan and I.S. Schkovskii and their 1966 book "Intelligent Life in the Universe", which I first encountered as a college freshman in an introductory astronomy course. The book (a marvelous, although somewhat technical, read, by the way), deals with the assessment of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial intellingent civilizations. After a long and quite thorough description of the universe and an equally long dissertation on the nature of life the authors attempt to calculate the probability of the existence of intelligent life on other planets. A central fork-in-the-road in this discussion was, assuming that intelligent life develops on habitable planets as a matter of course, whether technically sophisticated civilizations tend to destroy themselves in short order, or, conversely, tend to surmount their initial challenges and survive for millenia. At the time of my first reading this debate seemed little more than an interesting academic exercise, but now it lurks in my memory like a long-dead ghost, and I'm haunted by the knowledge of missed (or dismissed) opportunities and the colossal and unending stupidity and short-sightedness of our kind.
Another marvelous book leaps to mind. On the final page of "Black Elk Speaks" the old shaman climbs to the sacred peak in the Black Hills and, standing in an unseasonable drizzle, extends his arms to heaven and pleads: "Oh, let my people live!"
Is this to be our plea? Our final Whimper?