Remember That One Time?

The Sheltons, who seem like a real barrel of laughs, posing by a large dead American Chestnut tree, trying to win a photo contest for “Bleakest Family Portrait” (circa 1920, Tremont Falls, TN).

MEMORIAL DAY, Part 1

Memorial Day is not really about remembering those who “made the ultimate sacrifice”. It’s designed to give a little turn of that spinning plate called Patriotism that’s balancing atop the tall towering poll of Empire to keep it from falling to the ground, shattering the illusion that we are all somehow — by some insane backwards definition of the word — “free”, and that our “freedom” is only made possible by the fallen service members who “sacrificed” their lives to defend that freedom from bad guys who wanted to take those freedoms away.

Hooey, I say.

Service members aren’t sacrificing their lives, they are being sacrificed (there’s a difference). They are human sacrifices, sacrificed to ensure the freedoms of the rich, the freedoms of corporations, the freedoms of the western governments who will do whatever it takes to secure land and resources for themselves. We’re told they are “protecting our way of life”. What life?…..Uh, the one that is rapidly killing ALL LIFE ON EARTH??? That one????? Service members’ are not serving some great, over idealized, freedom-loving, holy beacon of light nation or great democracy. Again, I call hooey. Their service is actually just all about protecting the interests of the wealthy and powerful. No one in their right mind would thank someone for killing and terrorizing innocent civilians in far off lands, or for taking water rights away from the locals in those lands, or for ensuring that large oil companies can do whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want to whoever they want.

But that’s essentially what we do. We thank everyone and everything but the actual one thing that is the true source of all life: Earth.

We have to stop saying “Thank you for your service” to veterans and instead say “I’m so sorry you were exploitated by Empire. I’m sorry you were used as a human pawn, sorry you were sacrificed in the name of Imperialism and greed and domination and mineral extraction.”

This is a trick question cartoon because doi, there ARE no grown-ups in this culture! We are all kept in a perpetual state of arrested development so we can be more easily controlled by authorities who we think “know best”.

War, what is it good for? — absolutely nothing…well except for making the rich richer, it’s REALLY good for that. War is a racket. War is a profiteer machine. Halliburton, formerly run by Dick Cheney, made BILLIONS “rebuilding” Iraq after the U.S. invasion. That’s like the big bad wolf blowing your house down and then charging you to reconstruct it for you….BUT you will have to do most of the work yourself for little to no pay. {Side note: Indigenous stories actually honor animals, often placing them spiritually above humans. Colonizer stories demonize animals, like with the wolf in ‘Red Riding Hood’ and the wolf in ‘The Three Little Pigs’. So is it any wonder this culture almost wiped out wolves?….And only values them because they save us money on car collision repair???? No, the real “Big Bad Wolf” isn’t the wolf, it’s us}

And the selling of arms to other countries is also big big business for the U.S., selling more weapons than any other country, by a shit load….nay, by a FUCK TON (there are roughly 1000 shit loads in one fuck ton)

As you can see, France’s weapon exports were all smuggled out inside a giant piece of Key Lime Pie

Here is a mesmerizing video of the flow of weapons from the U.S. to other countries over several decades. Don’t be fooled by the colors, this is not a Skittles ad……

Taste the Rainbow of Pain

Here’s a palette cleanser of a natural flow chart….

There is no profit to be made from peace, because peace would require sharing, and dwindling human activity down to the bare essentials. But real peace isn’t just about eliminating militaristic warfare. Real peace can only come about from taking down nearly every aspect of our industrial lives, because so very much of what we do everyday is a terrorist attack on the living Earth.

But we are constantly propagandized to believe that war (not peace) is necessary in order to keep us safe and free, to stop “the bad guys”, and to “spread democracy”. Things like Freedom of Speech or Freedom of Religion weren’t “won” for us on the battlefield in some foreign land, they were merely bones thrown to us to create the illusion of “rights” so that we are placated enough to not storm the castle (which we should be doing everyday for a million good reasons. It’s embarrassing that the only ones who did, did it for a totally made up idiotic reason). Compared to previous societies, we are perhaps the most apathetic, subservient, passive civilization to ever exist, almost completely acquiescing to this nightmare of a culture that is murdering the planet at an ever increasing rate and creating evermore inequality everyday…..

The powers that be need us to believe the narrative that if we don’t go to war and protect our “freedoms” (which are at best, limited allowances) then the bad guys will come in and take it all away from us. But it’s this country that is doing the taking on a global scale.

The U.S. military has an absolutely humungoid environmental footprint. It produces more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined! It leaves depleted uranium, oil, jet fuel, pesticides, Agent Orange, lead, sexual assault and countless other toxins wherever it goes. U.S. Military bases are consistently ranked as some of the most toxic places on Earth…..and there are over 800 bases worldwide*! — for context, all the other nations of the world only have a combined 33 military bases outside their borgers! {*This is the ultimate overcompensating for small penis size. If America has the smallest penis size, then what country has the biggest penis size, you ask? — And since you were wondering, yes, ALL countries ARE STRAIGHT CIS MALES — Well, if you go by how much a country spends on their military, I reckon Iceland probably has the biggest penis because only 0.1% of their GDP goes to the military, no compensating there! Whereas Italy tried to compensate for its small penis size by making the shape of their country look like one. You’re not fooling anyone, Italy!}.

AND the U.S. freakin’ Military uses more freakin’ oil and emits more freakin’ greenhouse gases than most freakin’ countries freakin’ do! Freak!

So how is it “keeping us safe” if the military plays a big role in the degradation of Nature, in the endangerment of all of Earth’s ecosystems?

And the whole “spreading democracy” narrative is the epitome of hooey. The U.S. military & government has stifled democracy more than any other nation! But our mainstream media relentlessly reminds us how Russia tried to undermine our democracy by interfering with elections (First of all, what democracy? We are NO WAY close to living in a representative democracy. Second of all, we’ve done a pretty good job destroying it ourselves, thank you very much! Stop giving Russia all the credit!). But no other nation on Earth has done more to destroy democracy worldwide than the one you’re sitting in right now….that’s right, the call is coming from inside the house, y’all!!!!

From 1946–2000, the U.S. interfered in the elections of over 80 foreign elections, and that doesn’t count U.S.-backed coups and invasions. But this interference was done for good reasons, right?! For freedom and humanitarianism and all that jizz! Nope. It was done for domination, not democracy. True Democracy is not compatible with Capitalistic Imperialism. REPEAT: True Democracy is not compatible with Capitalistic Imperialism. So to ensure corporate interests, the U.S. has done things like staging and supporting coups to out elected leaders that refused to comply with the U.S. Empire’s agenda of resource grabbing, or issuing crippling sanctions on poor countries, or funding further colonization (as we do for Israel) or destroying entire nations with nonstop warfare and chaos which makes any kind of democracy nearly impossible and often breeds terrorist groups, and then these terrorist groups serve as the ultimate scapegoat villains, so that we don’t see who the real villains are.

So what do you call that which creates the conditions that give rise to terrorist organizations (and even sells arms to them)?

Would ‘Architect of Evil’ be a fitting title? What about ‘The Founding Fathers of Fuck You’ or ‘Captain Asshole’ ?

What if Memorial Day was about remembering all the countless victims of U.S. militarism (including veterans and dead soldiers) BUT also the victims (including non human ones) of Industrial Civilization in general?

Fecund is a good word, no? There’s probably a good reason we don’t use that word very often….Perhaps because it sounds like a dirty word, but mainly because the fertility rates of nearly everything have dropped significantly so we simply have no use for that word anymore.

It’s challenging for us modern humans, born into the aftermath of so much life being silenced forever, to truly comprehend what an empty world we are living in compared to just 200 years ago. In the last 40 years alone, wildlife populations have decreased by over 65%. Almost HALF of all species are now IN DECLINE. Of all land mammals, only 4% now are wild ones (some estimates are even less than that), the other 96% are us humans and our domesticated animals (mostly cows) — who contribute little to nothing to the enrichment of the ecology, and in fact greatly harms the ecology.

So much has been destroyed in such a short amount of time by the voracious, insatiable colonizer settler mindset.

But why? What drove the settlers to be so destructive? Why couldn’t they just be cool and peacefully integrate with the different Native peoples of this land, many of whom were initially welcoming and willing to share and help the settlers learn how to live here?

Because unlike the indigenous cultures that had resided over this land, the colonizers were coming from a culture that had long broken their deep bond with Nature and their own true human nature, and had come to see Nature as something to dominate and control and abuse and discard, AND they saw Native Peoples not as fellow human beings but as part of that Nature to dominate. The white colonialists were no longer capable of learning from their mistakes, and just doubled down on them instead. And this mentality is still at the center of our political and economic systems today. But why? What will it take for us all to see this is no way to live and that we desperately need to outright abandon this insane in the membrane behavior and return to some semblance of sanity?

What is actually driving all this?

Personally I think it all comes down to two things: male fragility and complex ongoing trauma.

As civilization & industry led us further away from our true nature, I believe it created conditions in which men in particular started feeling more and more inadequate and insecure. Their unchecked and escalating overcompensation for these wounds have led us here. War, climate change, inequality, wealth disparity, capitalism: these aren’t the problems, these are just the consequences of what happens when men are not made to feel useful or appreciated in healthy ways and are pressured to suppress their feelings and act tough and strong. The bruised male ego is one of the root causes of so much of the suffering and destruction we see today.

A paraphrased Margaret Atwood quote goes “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” I really think this sums up much of the dynamics of this MAN made world we are trapped in, it’s largely designed to stroke men’s egos because this stupid culture never gave them them the chance to actually become men. Hey, I know I’m in danger of generalizing here but give me a break, it’s just a friggin’ Medium essay for crying out loud. Do you really want me to go off on a whole other tangent about how white male supremacy has forced us all into a rigid narrow boring compartmentalized notion of sex and gender, and in reducing the spectrum of human diversity it has in turn led to a great reduction in biodiversity? I didn’t think so, this essay is long enough as it is, I already know some TLDR jokers are gonna message me to tell me this is too long).

So I don’t think anything will really improve unless we start really addressing this. Men aren’t the problem, their behavior is, the culture is, and their awful behavior is a result of severe generational trauma and the deprivation of healthy developmental conditions.

“When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That’s the message he is sending.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

You hear that, Jeff Bezos? You in pain, dude, bigtime.

But we can’t just stop the likes of Jeff Bezos….(or we can leave that to the Orcas)….

……we have to stop the culture that traumatized him and produced him and ENCOURAGES him, or else more Jeff Bezos are coming down the line. The same pain that is driving Jeff Bezos to attain evermore money and power and attention, is also driving us to shop on Amazon.com for crap we think will make us whole or better or happy (spoiler, it won’t). But as Thich pointed out, our pain spills over….and into places like the actual Amazon which is mostly clear cut for beef production, the consumption of which is about to skyrocket here this time of year: Americans (who eat more meat per capita than any other country) eat the most meat between Memorial Day and Labor Day, driven by all the outdoor grilling (done mostly by men as a very cheap poor substitute for actual meaningful activities that would provide healthy sustenance to others and give their lives purpose). In the Amazon this May there was a 40% increase in deforestation from last May. But no Memorial Day barbeques in America will recognize such a “sacrifice”.

The modern human animal is just constantly trying to gain some kind of equilibrium from all the different complex wounds and trauma and stress and confusion caused by living without any real sense of healthy culture and community that is rooted in reality and compassion and a meaningful interconnected relationship with the Earth. It’s an endless battle to feel OK, leaving no time to actually fight and tear down the very systems causing us to feel so not OK. So so so much of our energy is tied up in just trying to contend with living in such insane systems created by men who were in deep deep pain. This country was founded on that pain. And because this has never been properly dealt with, that pain just keeps piling up, like the Buffalo skulls in this photo….

Two highly traumatized men posing with their fragile egos atop a pile of buffalo skulls, 1870

It’s estimated that there were at least 60 million buffalo here before the European invasion. We must be clear: it was an invasion — not brave pioneering or the establishing of harmless idyllic ‘Little House on the Prairie’ settlements, but a violent, disrespectful, psychotic invasion. And it was spearheaded by men. This is something we always leave out, that all of this shit was (and still is) being done mostly by highly traumatized white men who need to be stopped, who need to be treated and healed.

Most of the buffalo slaughtering was done between 1800 and 1900. By the turn of the century there were fewer than 1000 left. As biologist Victor Scheffer has said “Although nature needs thousands or millions of years to create a new species, man needs only a few dozen years to destroy one.” Correction: ‘Industrialized Colonizer Man’ only needs a few dozen years. Stop projecting your pain and guilt onto ALL humans, Victor.

The Buffalo were killed for their hides, but also killed as an attempt to wipe out Native populations who relied heavily on the Buffalo for every aspect of their lives, including their spiritual needs. The government encouraged and incentivized Settlers to slaughter the Buffalo. At the height of the killing, a single man would kill over 150 Buffalo in one day. Men would often shoot them from moving trains, as depicted in the film ‘Dead Man’……

If those brave, determined early American settlers and pioneers hadn’t done all the hard work of creating a living hellscape out of healthy ecosystems, then we would STILL have to be directly doing it ourselves! Thanks to them forging the way, so much of the destruction today is conveniently at our fingertips, in just the click of a BUY button!

Here is a story from a woman of the Kiowa tribe (a Great Plains People) after the Buffalo were defeated:

“Everything the Kiowas had came from the buffalo . . . . The buffalo were the life of the Kiowa . . . . The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them . . . . So when the white man wanted to build railroads, or when they wanted to farm and raise cattle, the buffalo protected the Kiowa. They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens. They chased the cattle off the ranges.

Then the white man hired hunters to do nothing but kill the buffalo. Up and down the plain these men ranged, shooting sometimes as many as a hundred buffalo a day. Behind them came skinners with their wagons. They piled the hides . . . into the wagons until they were full and then took their loads to the new railroad stations that were being built, to be shipped east to the market.

The buffalo saw that their day was over. They could protect their people no longer. Sadly, the last remnant of the great herd gathered in council, and decided what they would do.

Straight to Mount Scott the leader of the herd walked. Behind him came the cows and their calves, and the few young males who had survived. As the woman watched, the face of the mountain opened.

Inside Mount Scott the world was green and fresh, as it had been when she was a small girl. The rivers ran clear, not red. The wild plums were in blossom, chasing the redbuds up the inside slopes. Into this world of beauty, the buffalo walked never to be seen again.”

~ Old Lady Horse, as told to Alice Marriott, from ‘American Indian Mythologies’ 1968

MEMORIAL DAY, Part Deux: Don’t Bug Me

The historic range of the Rocky Mt. Locust

The last major swarm of the Rocky Mt. Locust (which is a kind of grasshopper — but I learned that grasshoppers are sometimes referred to as locusts when their swarms reach biblical proportions) happened in 1874 throughout the Great Plains. They were a migratory insect that moved from Canada down to Texas. The great 1874–75 swarm is speculated to have contained over 12 trillion locusts and weighed an estimated 27 million tons, that’s more than all the buffalo weighed at the height of their population of 60 million! AND, the locusts consumed MORE plant material than the buffalo did!

They were perhaps one of the largest populations of insects to EVER exist. The size of that swarm was bigger than the state of California! For more context, this swarm was bigger than the egos of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk AND Bill Gates COMBINED!!!!! Can you imagine???? Their swarms were known to choke rivers, block out the sun for hours, stop trains, consume the wool off of sheep, and there were even accounts of them eating clothes right off of people! So cool.

They also completely decimated the crops of settlers, leading to starvation. One farmer said his 15 acre field of corn was eaten down to the ground in under 3 hours. There were even several accounts of local creeps showing up naked to town meetings claiming that the locusts ate all their clothes (this one is not true, it is a joke that I have made up for your amusement). For years the settlers had been waging a war on the locusts but nothing was working. They tried blowing them up, crushing them, and some settlers would build huge elaborate fire trenches around their homesteads but the locusts easily suffocated the flames with their sheer numbers. The comedians of the day even tried insult comedy directed at the locusts in hopes of offending them so they would leave.

Then the government started paying people to kill them. In Missouri you were required by law to spend 2 days a week plowing up and killing locust eggs and larva, if you didn’t comply you were heavily fined. Can you imagine how people would react today if the government forced us to do something like that? Even just hinting at a soda tax makes people flip their lids!

Here’s a newspaper article from the 1870s, featuring a contraption to catch and kill the locusts. Nothing weird or scary about the line “Then this practical-minded person set about to devise a death machine….”

I spotted a typo: “practical-minded” should read “psychotic”.

When you look up info about all this, you’ll see several articles mentioning how these massive swarms in the 1870’s were “the biggest natural disaster of settler times”. This is just as illogical as Alanis Morissette’s line “It’s like rain on your wedding day” claiming to be an example of irony! That’s not irony, Alanis! (…..Hmmmmm, UNLESS you had a theme wedding planned and the theme was ‘Drought’ and THEN it rained — BOOM, now that’s how you do Irony! Unfortunately for the wedding guests there will be no alcohol served at that theme wedding….because it’s a DRY wedding, get it?…because it’s a drought theme, lol, lol, lol. ANOTHER example of irony would be a drought themed wedding that ISN’T dry, but has a really nice open bar. More irony still would be a drought themed wedding that does not serve any dry alcohol but only super sweet girl drinks. Hope that’s enough examples of irony for you, Alanis! Glad to help!)

But the locust swarm wasn’t a “natural disaster”!!!!!!!!!

The settlers with their ‘LET’S CLEAR THE LAND OF FUCKING EVERYTHING AND THEN PLOW THE HELL OUT OF IT AND PUT A SHIT TON OF COWS ALL OVER IT’ form of agriculture was the disaster, a HUGE disaster for the natural world! And eventually for the locusts themselves! One modern theory as to why the locust populations got so big in the 1870s was because all the settlers’ rampant de-foresting and plowing and cattle grazing actually helped create a terrible drought that killed certain fungi that usually kept the locust population in check, because that’s how Nature works and if we could just realize this it would make everything so much easier.

Before the Great Plains were “settled”, periodic swarms of locusts happened all the time. It’s called nature, not a “disaster”! The swarms are only deemed a “disaster” because they were interfering with coo coo crazy colonizer settler life that operates out of sync with nature, that looks to dominate nature, not work with it, not be at one with it. The swarms were a SIGN and the settlers should have taken it to mean that the way they were living was stupid and unsustainable and causing great disturbances and imbalance. It should’ve been a wake-up call, not an excuse to “devise a death machine”. But here we are today, three years out from a pandemic and we have learned ZILCH from this “natural disaster”. No “thank you, Coronavirus, for showing us all plain as day how effed up our entire way of life is” from us! Not even a hint of course correction is to be found. Remember at the start of the pandemic, there WAS a bunch of silver lining talk, touting this sense of “Hey, this could be a new dawn for humanity!” You saw hope filled videos like this one, as if it would be enough to undo generations upon generations of deep ingrained brainwashing and Stockholm Syndrome…..

After this video was made, the virus received this response in return: “Dear Virus, your video is great and all, love the production value, but you absolutely will not be enough to get us to change, like not even close, it’s cute that you even tried. We will continue to stick to what we know even if it’s the shittiest shit show ever, but hey, we appreciate your effort and thank you for your concern. Sincerely, Traumatized Industrialized Society”

And just like us, the settlers didn’t fucking learn anything either, they persevered…..or rather, they “got back to “normal” ” (whoa, I just pulled off an air quote WITHIN an air quote, not an easy feat!) just like we’re fucking doing now. They really should change the definition of normal in the dictionary to “living in such a way that blindly obliterates Earth’s Natural Life Support Systems while breeding more and more inequality and injustice, BUT thinking it’s all totally fine because we know nothing else because we’ve been severed from our species rich history of living in harmony with our surroundings.”

In the late 1870’s the drought lifted and a wetter cycle reduced the locusts’ population to manageable numbers again so the settlers turned their knobs up on their death machines to MAXIMUM NORMAL and increased their efforts to plow up prairies and cut down forests with abandonment while they had the chance. And to prepare for the next drought (and subsequent swarms), the federal government formed a task force of entomologists to hatch a plan of action to eradicate this “pest” when they came back. But they never got to implement this plan.

Because the locust swarms never returned again.

By the turn of the century the locusts were all but gone. 1902 was the last recorded sighting of one. But the settlers, who had very little understanding of ecology, didn’t even know it was their shitfuckery that caused the locust to die off, they were just glad they were gone for good. In that wetter period after the swarm filled drought of 1874, the settlers, taking advantage of the ideal farming conditions, went hog wild, plowing up new land like never before, disturbing too much of the locusts’ breeding grounds in a way that irreversibly damaged them. It’s estimated that 150 locust egg cases per square inch of soil were destroyed by plowing. Another factor that aided the locusts extinction was that their survival was tied to that of the buffalo, and it was around that time that millions of buffalo were being slaughtered. Huh, too bad no one thought to ask ANY ONE NATIVE PERSON (who had been living there for thousands of years) anything at all about the locusts and the buffalo and how they may have been interdependent on one another. Funny how the Natives never almost all starved to death from the “natural disaster” of periodic locust swarms.

When the locust swarms succumbed, people had no idea why, and they didn’t care to know, they were like “Great, good riddance!” — A mentality I fear persists today, one that bugs are “pests” to be exterminated. A mentality that has contributed to the ongoing insect holocaust. In the last 25 years, flying insect populations have plummeted by 75%. Only a culture like ours — that has almost zero understanding of how crucial insects are to healthy functioning ecosystems — would not freak out about this. But we should be FREAKING THE FUCK OUT about this!!!!! Insects are the essential workers of Nature. They perform SO many crucial tasks and provide food for countless birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, and amphibians, not to mention reality TV shows where the contestants have to eat bugs!

I’m at the point where if I accidentally kill a bug I start weeping a little. I even cry if I accidentally transport one in a way where it won’t survive because it doesn’t know where it is because now it’s separated from it’s colony or hive or home and is lost forever and will die alone. At night I want to take a baseball bat to every outdoor light I see so it can’t fuck with nocturnal insects such as moths.

Insects are currently vanishing at a rate of over 2% a year. At that rate there won’t be any insects by the end of this century, but there is no reason to believe that rate won’t speed the fuck up. A worldwide pandemic barely slowed this shit show down, and everyone is chomping at the bit to get back to “normal” without any understanding of just how dangerous normal is for every living being on the only planet we know to harbor life.

Without insects there cannot be an us, there cannot be the kind of Earth that supports complex life.

Today, insects are up against so much more than the Rocky Mt. Locusts were: Light pollution, air pollution, plastic pollution, climate change, exterminators, pesticides (speaking of which, check out THIS insanity). Even our clothes are of no use to them: No self respecting insect is going to eat this non organic poly-cotton blend bullshit off our backs.

Here is a newspaper cartoon from the 1870’s depicting the Rocky Mt. Locusts bullying farmers. Man, the settlers really were so victimized and persecuted in every possible way, it’s so unfair. There really should be a day honoring them and the ultimate sacrifices they made so that we could have the freedom today to legally kill insects in every way imaginable. Oh wait, I forgot, there is a day! It’s called EVERY DAY IN AMERICA.

Sadly, the locusts went extinct before they could get these badass photos developed

Today we are in danger of all dying from irony pollution (something Alanis Morissette would know nothing about) just as much as anything else.

Here is a screen shot from an article I was reading on LiveScience. This image speaks volumes (but unfortunately we aren’t listening).

What kills me just as much as the destruction of the Earth is the relentless and ruthless schizophrenic messaging we are endlessly force fed by this sadistic culture that normalizes the shit out of this destruction.

An ad for “Extra days of summer deals” right beside a headline that reads

‘Satellites may have been underestimating the planet’s warming for decades’ ?????!!!!!!!!!

You just can’t make this shit up!….Only someone is, and we are all buying it, literally….because, well, the deals are just too good to pass up!

“Extra days of summer are coming” needs to be the new “Winter is coming” tagline of impending doom. Except that most of us only see an upside to there being longer summers, that means more cookouts!

We need a new kind of Memorial Day. One that truly gets us to comprehend all that has been “sacrificed” in the name of overconsumption and profit margins and the economy and “jobs” and all of industrial civilization’s luxuries that are hocked off as “necessities”. We need so little but we are trained to TAKE so much without being made aware of the dire consequences.

Hey, want an even more devastating take on civilization? Here ya go…..

If we aren’t careful (and we are showing no signs of doing so) there won’t be anyone around to even observe a Memorial day for all the Life that was lost to keep this shit show going for as long as it has.

When will we come to our collective senses? Is that even possible? Is there anything that can reach us? Aren’t we sick of all this yet? I fear not.

MEMORIAL DAY, Part 3: How would you like it if someone came along and picked something off of you???!

Our sick culture can’t even see this photo for what it is: The murdered corpse of an ancient family member being hauled off to be made into something 1000% unnecessary.

Imagine your own human grandmother being killed to make a chair out of her body, when we already have more than enough chairs….plus humans had somehow figured out how to sit down long before we even had chairs, it’s called the ground, it’s called squatting.

Maybe if we sat on the ground more often, closer to the Earth, we wouldn’t be so cavalier about killing our own kin for the stupidest reasons ever.

But we don’t see trees as kin.

People seem super into finding out all about their “ancestry” these days with all those popular DNA tests.

But it’s ALL our ancestry, fools! ALL OF LIFE IS RELATED!!!! But since we are trained to be so incredibly human-centric and myopic we can’t see or feel this reality.

We share DNA with Every. Living. Thing.

Meaning we have a common ancestor with Every. Living. Thing.

Even bacteria.

We share 98.8% of our DNA with Chimps…sure, everyone knows that.

But did you know we share 98% of our DNA with pigs!??? So your creepy, over the top, obsessive love of bacon basically makes you a cannibal, dude. So pull yourself together and show some respect, geez.

With Cats we share 90% of our DNA

Dogs 84%

Slugs 70%

Fruit Flies 61%

Bananas 60% (I could TOTALLY see the family resemblance with this one in this one guy I dated once. No, not because of THAT, get your mind out of the gutter! It was because he was so sweet!…..No, I’m just kidding, I’ve never had the pleasure of dating a sweet guy, it was the first thing like you thought.)

You live in a culture incapable of holding any kind of real memorial for all the life that’s been lost by the cold reckless foolhardy hands of industrial capitalist civilization. A culture that fails to even remotely recognize the staggering numbers of our fellow Earthlings (OUR FAMILY) that have fallen in just a few generations: Salmon runs so thick rivers were more fish than water. Whales so populous that the fog of their breath on a cold morning made it hard to see at sea. Passenger Pigeon flocks so gargantuan they would darken the sky for days. Great stands of lofty American Chestnut Trees so abundant with nuts that it seemed as though the bounty would never and could never end.

But it did.

There was a time, not that long ago, especially in Earth time, when the American Chestnut ruled Eastern forests. One out of every 4 trees was a Chestnut. At the heart of the Chestnut’s range in Pennsylvania it was one out of every 3 trees.

It’s estimated that there were 4 BILLION Chestnut trees, spanning from Maine down to Mississippi and Florida. Considered the “Redwoods of the East”, they grew 100 feet tall, with an average diameter of 9ft. Their nuts were highly edible and delicious and easy to process — a staple for humans and animals alike.

In 1904, the fungus that would eventually do in all the Chestnut trees was first discovered at the NYC botanical gardens. It had been accidentally imported from Asia (as if this insane destructive culture is an “accident”).

The blight spread at a rate of 30 miles a year.

By 1950 all these great giants were gone. The fungus spores that took them down are still present in Eastern forests today, but it was only the Chestnut that was adversely affected by it.

The wood of the Chestnut was straight, light, easy to work, and as rot resistant as Redwood lumber. So much of early American infrastructure was built from the wood of the Chestnut…from railway ties to utility polls to paper to shingles to furniture. You could call the Chestnut the ultimate ‘Giving Tree’ but it was more accurate to call European settlers the ultimate ‘Taking People’.

I’m always astounded when people speak of Shel Silverstein’s book ‘The Giving Tree’ with such fondness. I don’t know the intentions Shel had when he wrote it but to me it always seemed like a cautionary tale about what happens when we take too much, when we take advantage of someone’s generosity, and when personal “sacrifice” crosses the line into a kind of self destruction that ultimately helps no one.

Not healthy, tree. In my experience that’s a recipe to be walked all over and then get your ass dumped for a younger tree.

But such a tale is largely lost on this society we live in. This manifest destiny culture of ours reads a book like ‘The Giving Tree’ and says, “Aw, isn’t it so touching how much the tree loved the boy and would do ANYTHING for him?!” That’s not love. And that kid was a real dickweed. And the tree was a people pleasing pushover. No real tree would willingly give so much to such an ungrateful fuckface who gives nothing back. But that’s how this culture views Nature, as something to take, as serving man, as actually WANTING to serve man. As a kid I remember that book making me angry. I especially was bothered by the fact that the human was a dude and the tree was a girl who kept giving and giving and giving and giving and giving and giving and giving and giving and giving (and giving) of herself without receiving anything in return until she gave so much that she up and died. Yeah, that tracks.

It’s not that we don’t have any cautionary tales today, it’s just that they are greatly outnumbered by more powerful, prevalent stories that reinforce, normalize, and glorify war/conquest/ greed/individualism/consumerism. But it’s also because we misinterpret the hell out of the few cautionary tales we have.

The board game Monopoly was actually created in 1904 by a radical woman named Elizabeth Magie. It was orginally called ‘The Landlord’s Game’, and was invented to teach young people about the absurdity and unfairness and injustice of capitalism/real estate/private property, and how this is a game that the average person can never win. Her game had not one, but two sets of rules to choose from:

One was called “Prosperity”, where every player won money anytime another gained a property. And the game was won by everyone playing only when the person who had the least doubled their resources. A game promoting cooperation for the greater social good.

The other set of rules was called “Monopoly”, where players succeeded by taking properties and rent from those with less luck rolling the dice. The winner was the person who used their power to eliminate everyone else.

She really wanted to demonstrate how different we feel when playing Prosperity vs Monopoly.

When the Parker Bros stole the game, they erased the “Prosperity” rules, leaving only the “Monopoly” ones.

So you’re telling me a woman had her work stolen and co-opted by men and was given no credit for her own idea?! Now I’ve heard everything!

The blight that wiped out 4 billion Chestnut trees in a matter of a few decades wasn’t really seen as a tragedy for the Chestnut and all the wildlife that depended on it, but as a blow to American settler life. By the end of the 19th century, lumber had surpassed agriculture as the number one reason for deforestation. So it’s not like a lot of those chestnut trees would’ve been safe anyways if the blight hadn’t hit. Many of them were slated for timber.

In 1840, timber production was at one billion board feet cut. Fast forward to 46 billion board feet cut in 1904, enough to fill more than 10,000,000 modern logging trucks!

By 1920, more than two-thirds of American forests had been leveled at least once, including the vast majority of eastern forests, where the Chestnut would have been if it was not already mostly gone from the blight.

Too many people are under the impression that Biden has reversed all of Trump’s horrible environmental policies. But as Biden promised while speaking to a room full of rich donors on the campaign trail “Nothing will fundamentally change.” Let’s be CLEAR: Unless we have a leader that says “EVERYTHING must fundamentally change, and I mean EVERYTHING!” then we need to be done with “leaders”. The only leading they are doing is leading us off a cliff.

Biden did “pause” oil and gas leases on public land (language that suggests it will start up again when no one is looking) BUT he went and approved nearly 1,200 drilling permits in just three months!!!!!! A number almost as high as Donald Trump’s over a similar period at the end of his term.

And in matters where it seems like an easy-peasy no-brainer of a decision to overturn some dipshit Trumpian project, Biden wavers. He’s still “deciding” whether or not to green-light the U.S. Forest Service’s “Black Ram Project” which would authorize commercial harvesting on 3,904 acres in the Kootenai National Forest of Montana, including the clear-cutting of at least 579 acres of subalpine fir, western larch and spruce trees along the Yaak River. Some of these trees are 800 years old. This ecosystem serves as a vital corridor for species such as wolves, lynx, wolverine, mountain goats and grizzly bears.

Biden’s forest service seems to be on track to keep “business as usual forestry” going, under the guise that thinning trees helps prevent forest fires. This logic is SOLID because duh, you can’t have forest fires if there are no forests! Brilliant!

Few dare talk about the concept of ZERO CUT when it comes to forests. Well, here’s one guy that does: Director of the Native Forest Council, Tim Hermach, an old coot who has had enough!…..

“If we care about the survival of humanity on this Earth, we will stop cutting down living beings, trees, and turning them into toilet paper, newsprint, paper, and building products.”

In this interview, Tim recalls how environmentalists won a big court case to protect all old growth forests in the North West in the early 1990’s, much to the protest of the timber industry. But Bill Clinton in 1993, freshly elected, swooped in and called a Summit in Portland to come to a “compromise” between the two “sides” (when oh when will wanting to murder the Earth for profit stop counting as a “side”???). The panel had some environmentalists on it but they were outnumbered by capitalists put there by Clinton. The result: the court orders were lifted, leaving only some forests protected.

There can be no “compromising” when it comes to the health of the planet! That’s like negotiating with Hitler to only kill Jews on Mondays and Wednesdays and only using “humane” methods of execution and then calling it a win win situation. This culture of “compromise” has to stop. W are all settlers in the sense that we are constantly settling for the worst.

Recently I visited ‘Vinton Furnace State Forest’ in south eastern Ohio (that’s what us modern industrialized humans do, we “visit” nature, as if they are some old distant relative on their death bed that we never had any real relationship with). This place is over 13,000 acres of Oak/Hickory forest that’s been “protected” since the 1960’s (even though “sustainable” logging is still allowed because JOBS and MAKE MORE SHIT OUT OF WOOD OR THE ECONOMY WILL DIE).

I’ve never seen so many Oak species. And the diversity of other tree species was off the charts.

This forest is what’s called a biological hotspot (one of the most diverse in the entire country!). For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s basically just like a wifi hotspot, except you can’t use it to order food or post self important comments or look up the heights of celebrities — something I definitely have never done to find out if I’m taller than Beyonce, which if I had done I would know that I am, so suck it Ms. Knowles!…. hypothetically speaking that is.

Over 800 plant species are found there, several of which are rare and found few other places.

It’s also home to Ohio’s largest bobcat population.

Roughly 105 bird species breed in this forest. Treetop-dwelling Cerulean Warblers (who travel to the Andes in Colombia and Ecuador for the winter) have declined with alarming rapidity in recent years, but this forest supports one of the last remaining nesting populations.

54 species of Reptiles and Amphibians are also found there, which represent two thirds of all the Ohio species, right there in just a fraction of Ohio’s land.

It’s like the Amazon of Ohio.

Being there felt like having a glimpse of what was, before industrial human culture ripped up and mowed down so very much.

It was both sorrowful and serene. I didn’t want to leave but also became acutely aware of feeling as though I don’t know how to belong to such a place, not like past humans did.

That’s because we aren’t fully human.

Because we weren’t raised by real humans who live in right relationship with the land. We were raised in captivity by industrial civilization, in open air prisons. Yes, some people, such as myself, live in much nicer prisons than others, which is terrible, but we are all locked up to some degree, largely separated from our non human family.

Walking thru this forest, I came to a little clearing that had a couple dozen saplings planted with netting around them to protect them from deer/mice. There was a big sign. I walked over to it and it was all about the story of the American Chestnut. These saplings were experimental hybrid American Chestnut trees that may prove to be blight resistant.

But how do we even have American Chestnut saplings if they all died? Because the American Chestnut didn’t go extinct exactly. The blight only kills the above ground parts of the tree. The roots survive. For the last 100+ years these roots have sent up new growth. But the fungus always kills this growth before they can get big enough to flower.

What torture. It’s like being a woman and having no problem conceiving but then every fucking time you lose the baby just a few weeks into the pregnancy. Over and over this happens to you for eternity.

So because the American Chestnut isn’t fully dead, it’s labeled “technically extinct” by scientists. A fancy way of saying it’s a zombie tree. It’s the living dead.

I can’t help but feel as though the bulk of the human animal is also “technically extinct.”

So many of us are being kept alive by artificial life support systems.

If the plug is pulled then many of us die.

BUT if the plug ISN’T pulled many of us will also die from all the pollution and global warming and sea level rise and crop failure caused by running this plug 24/7….PLUS a lot of non human life forms will also die if we keep the plug in.

Ignoring this epic paradox will not serve us or what’s left of the natural world.

I’m seeing more and more articles like the one in The Guardian the other day with the headline:

‘Branching out: is communication possible between trees and people?’

My god, the hubris.

This is like a friend telling you how great the Beatles are because this friend just “discovered” them but you were a diehard fan by age 13. Yeah, I know dude, I’ve been saying!

It seems to me that a lot of scientific research is just about “discovering” shit that Native peoples already knew for millennia by way of actually living as a part of Nature. All scientific “RE”search is just “searching again” for what we all used to know but have forgotten, only this time when we re-find out, we’re real big dicks about it. Like, Icelandic size dicks.

~ ~ ~

We’ve made our beds — with our Memorial Day Sale mattresses, sitting atop frames built out of the bodies of our tree kin who we share 50% of our DNA with, under cotton sheets from fields that were once forests and prairies and marshes and bogs but now have been colonized by one species of plant for our comfort — It’s now high time to really lie in these beds we’ve made, beds we paid less than retail price for all because soldiers died horrific deaths, died not to “keep us safe” but to keep the interests of the rich safe, to keep this game of world domination safe, died protecting the prison and serving the corporate wardens holding us all captive.

But what does it look like to really lie in the beds we’ve made?

Maybe it looks like getting out of the bed and lying on the ground with the rest of our Earth family again — under the stars, under the tree canopies….only now it would be under the smog & light pollution obstructing our view of the stars, it would be under the absence of tree canopy.

But if we don’t lie down and look we won’t know what has been lost.

Now there’s a revolution I’d like to see: a lying down one where we let Nature just take us.

Because I’m friggin’ tired as shit. Aren’t you? Fuck.

I don’t think we modern industrial humans have even a remote understanding of what “the ultimate sacrifice” looks like. The word sacrifice actually means “to make sacred”. Somewhere along the way, as is true with so much of our language, it came to mean something else entirely that is no longer about making things sacred, but about degrading yourself for a false greater good sold to us by incredibly broken people (*cough*, men) to keep an incredibly insane system going.

Spoiler alert: no amount of money will make this royal dickweed happy

As author Wendell Berry said…..

“There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. My belief is that our life and the world in it are conditional gifts.”

As far as men go, Wendell is perhaps slightly less traumatized than most, but not to the point where he doesn’t think twice about passing off this as “his” belief and not the lived beliefs held by countless indigenous peoples around the world since forever.

Speaking of desecrated places: Nevada!

On a county level Nevada is the most toxic state, after Alaska. You’d think New Jersey would be up there because of the show ‘Jersey Shore’ alone! But no.

There are lots of important protests happening now that are worth following & participating in, such as the STOP COP CITY encampment in Georgia. Or there’s the Fairy Creek Blockade in Vancouver Island’s Ancient Temperate Rainforests on unceded Pacheedaht and Dididaht Territories, who are trying to stop the logging of the last remaining old growth forest in the area, home to 1000-2000 year old trees.

When the police tried to deny access to this Pacheedaht elder wanting to enter his own territory to get to the blockade, he says to them “I am now angry, I am hurt, I am humiliated, as I have been all my life by the dominance of a colonial system that taught me to be ashamed of myself. When in fact I know that you are serving a crown that has no shame….And that crown dominates and crushes people.”

But if you are to follow any protest, make it the one happening in Thacker Pass, Nevada because industrial civilization is on the precipice of ushering in the next big phase of environmental annihilation dressed up as “green”.

A gargantuan lithium mine is slated to go in at Thacker Pass (Lithium is needed for electric car batteries). Support for stopping an oil pipeline or protesting the cutting of old growth forests is more popular than ever, but the idea of stopping something that’s been widely sold to us as what will “Save the Earth” is much more challenging for many people, even environmentalists, to get on board with. Green energy doesn’t help Earth, it helps capitalism and as long as capitalism exists, Earth is in trouble. The public is far from understanding the truth that there is no such thing as “green” or “sustainable” energy. Instead it’s presented to us as a false dichotomy of Fossil fuels vs Solar & Wind Power: which side are you on? As if they are opposites and don’t both involve destructive extractive processes and lead to evermore ecological ruin (For more on this, read the new eye-opening book ‘Bright Green Lies’). Fossil fuel energy and green energy are just two sides of the same coin. It doesn’t matter if you use that coin to purchase a ticket for a gas powered train or an electric one. Time to get off that train altogether because it’s showing NO signs of stopping, blowing right past stops at Sanity City and Realityville. I mean, where the fuck are we going anyways? It’s not even about a destination anymore…..It’s all just about keeping the machine going at all costs. A machine that takes nature and poor people and turns them into profit and power for a handful of people (mostly white men).

Congress (mostly white men) is arguing right now over the debt ceiling. But if the government was worth even one damn it would be hashing out and fast tracking a new kind of debt ceiling that is all about the debt we owe to Nature, to those most exploited and most vulnrable. It’s way past time to power down, to stop. We need to stop destroying Nature’s infrastructure to build our synthetic one. W don’t need to fix roads or build new ones, we need to transition to living lives that require much much much less travel and shipping with the goal of radically hyper-localizing absolutely everything. We need to go full Doc Brown and say “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads”…..

…….and not because we all have fucking flying cars but because we are largely staying put! The more we move shit (and ourselves) around the more damage is done, much of it irreversible. (Side query: why the heck is “SHIPping” called that when no ships are involved?! And “CARgo” involves ships but no cars?! See how insane even our language is! No wonder we’re so so fucked in the head!!!!!)

One of the most dangerous phrases ever is “environmentally friendly”.

This phrase is used to sell us on things that in reality are “possibly slightly less horrific for the environment”. It’s a dangerous phrase too because it helps maintain a mindset that the “environment” is somewhere out there, totally separate from us, when in reality we are part of it.

We are doing so very much and allowing so very much to be done that is eating the Earth alive, but since so much of it is out of sight (and since so many of us live in very desecrated areas of the Earth) we cannot see or feel what is really happening.

Electric cars are presented as “environmentally friendly”. But lithium mining for electric car batteries, in the best case scenario, is a frenemy to the environment. In the worst case scenario: with friends like these who needs enemies!

In this article about the dangers of lithium mining, Guillermo Gonzalez, a lithium battery expert from the University of Chile says…

“Like any mining process, it is invasive, it scars the landscape, it destroys the water table and it pollutes the earth and the local wells. This isn’t a green solution — it’s not a solution at all.”

The general public is up against so much brainwashing when it comes to electric vehicles……

Like here is Biden shaming us because China is beating us at the game of destroying the planet for profit.

It’s chilling that this immature, broken, out of touch, vile human is given any amount of power or a platform. Has this brutal insanity been so normalized that we are incapable of moving past it?

And in this fucking article promoting electric cars, it flat out says “This isn’t a fad, this isn’t greenwashing.” Has NO ONE read 1984??????????????? This article is the very definition OF greenwashing!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

The more we all continue to comply with systems that are unraveling the very fabric of life the more our own sanity and humanity will unravel and we will be rendered completely useless in doing anything about it! It’s not just about saving what’s left of nature, but saving what is left of our capacity to care, to feel, to understand, and to intimately and lovingly KNOW the Earth and our true role in HER systems — not in these fake reckless make believe ones, for fucksake!

I fear that so many of us have just given up or are in pure survival mode trying to stay afloat within these miserable industrial capitalistic systems, so much so that hardly anyone is able to take any kind of stand against that which is destroying all that is dear and beautiful and complex. But we MUST take a stand! It’s like Katy Perry sang in her hit song, ‘Roar’:

“I stood for nothing, so I fell for anything.”

I guess Malcolm X said something similar but whatever.

But we can’t just stand for “something”, we have to stand for LIFE itself…all other “somethings” worth standing for won’t mean shit if we don’t have a functioning life-supporting planet to stand ON!!!!!!!!!!

If we don’t stand for LIFE then everything will fall. It already IS falling….to the tune of 200 species a day. Where the fucking shit is the Memorial Day for all these species!?!

This proposed lithium mine in Nevada must be stopped, because unlike stopping fossil fuel projects this one is about stopping the idea that we can just keep carrying on with this insane culture that does nothing but take and destroy. Thinking that merely changing the way this destruction is fueled is delusional.

Thacker Pass, NV (Photo by Max Wilbert)

Just look at this wondrous place.

Slated to be destroyed for lithium mining so we can have electric cars so we can “Save the Earth”.

I guess some places, like Thacker Pass, don’t count as “the Earth”.

And I guess all the living beings living at Thacker Pass have no “right” to be living there because they are in the way of our “progress”.

The animals, the trees, the corals, the organisms in the soil: They have no way of going to war with this culture to stop it from taking away their right to exist. Even the poorest humans, who take the brunt of the chaos being unleashed, have no real means of defending themselves.

Speaking of Twitter, I’ve been trying to point out there that even the most “progressive” voices within the system are still far from lifting the veil that keeps us from seeing reality.

This starvation has us living without a culture of reverence for Life — something we had for most of our existence as a species. It’s beyond dangerous. Can it even be called “living”????? And it’s completely impossible to cultivate such a Life honoring culture again as long as these political, economic, industrial and consumeristic systems we live under exist. We must break free from the great restraints they have on us. Don’t we want to feel alive before we all die?….Or are we dead already?????…..

In the film ‘Jojo Rabbit’, the teenage Jewish girl hiding in an attic while a nightmare world looms outside, laments to the woman protecting her “Perhaps we’re all ghosts now, we just don’t know it.” The woman tells the girl that no matter what, she must not lose faith, and that as long as she stays alive another day, the Nazis have not won. As long as we can feel something, can feel the grief of a dying world, can hold onto that feeling we had as kids-that feeling where we just knew that things weren’t right, remember?…As long as we try to recall the ancient muscle memories of living fully embraced in Her — swimming in a lagoon or climbing a tree or picking berries or dancing outside in a circle in our bare feet — then industrial civilization has not yet won.

And what does industrial civilization (i.e., the rich) even think it will “win”?

Immortality?

Wanting to live forever isn’t about living, it’s about being afraid to live, because REAL living, living with true interdependence, makes you not fear death but allows you to take some comfort in the fact that your death will contribute to new life, to the circle of Life. Our industrial “lives” do nothing but break the circle and we fear death because it’s a painful reminder that we contributed NOTHING to mending that circle while we lived. And even in our industrial deaths we take without giving back — either we’re incinerated using fossil fuels or we’re buried too deep and too cut off from the Earth to even contribute to the soil….and after all it had done for us during our entire so called lives.

The Earth will not miss our industrial lives, will not lament the end of them, nor memorialize them. The Earth will be relieved.

But the Earth lost the real us already, some time ago. Only a scant few real humans remain: The Hadza, Amazonian Tribes, the Jarawa (to name some), but their numbers are dwindling as the great nothing of Industrial Civilization closes in on them, closes in on everything.

It’s unclear where exactly things went wrong. A common defense mechanism against fully feeling the fatal follies of industrialized humanity is when I hear people say (and it’s always a man in my experience who says this) is the one that goes “Early humans back in the day wiped out several large fauna species like the Mastodon and Mammoth and Giant Sloth, so see, we’re not the only assholes, they did it first!” This comparison is absurd. A couple years ago this man 20 years my senior, let’s call him Bob, who has somewhat of a following in environmental circles friended me and was offering to “mentor” me, but it quickly turned into trying to seduce me. When I turned him down he immediately called out another man we both knew who I had been corresponding with (not in a romantic way) but who had suddenly ghosted me out of the blue. Bob ratted out this other guy saying “the reason he stopped talking to you is because he got a new girlfriend” in order to make himself look less shitty. And since so many Indigenous peoples of this continent are known to have philosophies based on living in balance with nature and on how everything’s connected, well maybe that’s because they had actually learned something from those earlier mistakes of wiping out large animal species. I mean, the Great Plains Peoples managed to not wipe out the Buffalo, could it have something to do with regarding the buffalo as their kin and so they were constantly paying gratitude to the Buffalo, and understood that the Buffalo’s well being was tied up in their own.

We too often act as if the world is only as old as industrial civilization, not realizing so much of our current reality is incredibly new: electricity, fossil fuels, cars, grocery stores, class systems, even money. It’s hard to imagine life without those things. But if we don’t start trying we will dig bigger and bigger holes, holes too deep for future generations (or even young people today) to climb out of. People have said to me “We can’t go back to living like cave men!” I used to always reply “Well of course not, that’s not what I’m proposing!” But now I say “Well, we had better damn well try.”

But maybe it’s not important to know what went wrong……Unless there’s a Venn diagram for it! And lookie here! There IS one!!!!

This is of course a gross oversimplification. Venn Diagrams are the enemy of complexities and nuance, which is exactly why our black and white, short attention span culture loves them so.

But the trouble definitely started with creating conditions that easily allowed us to forget enough that we stopped learning from our mistakes, stopped evolving in ways that benefited more than just us. It started when we stopped saying to each other “Remember that one time?” and have it be referring to a time when we were at one with the Earth & each other and not referring to an episode of ‘Friends’……

I hate myself for how badly I want to watch the new ‘Friends’ reunion special!!! Growing up without a healthy, in tact, nature-based culture has made culture vampires out of us. Pop culture filled the void where real culture should have been.

Imagine knowing the lines of the natural world as well as we know the lines from sitcoms. Imagine having as much fondness for whales, for salmon, for locusts, for red winged black birds, for trees, for bees, for soil biota as we do for fictional characters played by actors who were made rich for basically pretending.

We have to stop pretending.

Humans NEED stories. Originally, we used storytelling to understand our world, to pass on important knowledge, to reinforce lessons and values, to remind us what the gosh darn point is. But our desire for stories is greatly preyed upon and profited off of and used as a way to control, numb and placate us into submission. Most of the stories we ingest within the context of industrial civilization merely normalize the insanity of this shit show and make us come to love our captors, love the show they put on for us so we never want to leave. We are made to actually feel nostalgia for the insanity of industrialized life, for a culture that is murdering the Earth and generating evermore wealth disparity.

But we can take back the power of stories and use it to usher in a world that starts to make sense again.

In other words, there’s still time to pivot!

There’s still time to look to those few remaining humans who never pivoted away from reality, from Earth, and from their humanity in the first place. A living memoriam to humanity’s humble glory.

The Jarawa somehow manage to be quite content despite not being able to quote episodes of ‘Friends’ to one another. It’s like, could they BE any more content? Answer: Yes, if the rest of us stopped being such dickweeds.

Far too often in this culture, respects are paid to the wrong people and to the wrong causes. It’s hard to believe that before and after photos like this one from Vancouver Island aren’t enough to get us to call this whole thing off.

Sorry, James and Caroline Shelton of Tremont Falls TN, this beats your family’s photo of bleakness.

We are running out of before. If we don’t stop the destruction, there will be nothing but AFTER. After everywhere you look…and no culture remaining that can remember before enough to hold any kind of proper Memorial for anything or anyone, the kind of memorial that actually moves us to FIGHT FOR LIFE IN THE HERE AND NOW….because we very well may be past the point of saving the future, all we have is today. So what can we do today, FOR today? For the life that’s left today? Those in power ARE living for the day, they are taking and doing what they want, NOW….while those who say they care about Life are largely not harnessing that same cutthroat energy to save Life. I hate to say it but we all need to be more like Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos to stop monsters like them who have no regard or respect or love or awe for Life. Actually, we need to be more like the Sentinelese, the most “isolated” tribe on Earth. They attempt to kill anyone from the “outside” world trying to come onto their island in the Indian Ocean. They know what is at stake.

A Sentinelese man shooting a bow and arrow at a police helicopter

There is thought to be less than 100 Sentinelese individuals left. They remarkably survived the 2004 Tsunami that killed thousands (but not remarkable if you understand that barely any animals died either because they are tapped in enough to feel the tsunami coming and take cover). In this video about how they killed a young American Missionary in 2018 who was attempting to make contact with them in order to “save” them with Christianity, the news anchor states that the Sentinelese “Choose to remain disconnected from the world.”

Too often we use the word “world” to mean the Earth. But the “world” as we know it isn’t real, isn’t rooted in reality. It’s constructed by exploiting and manipulating the real world — NATURE — for the benefit of a few. The Sentinelese are more connected to that real world than anyone. It is us that choose to remain disconnected from the world. It is us who choose to disrespect the dead by not fighting for the living world. The Sentinelese aren’t fighting for their lives, they’re fighting for LIFE, of which they are a part of. To fight for an industrialized human life’s “right” to exist is to fight for more evermore destruction. In the immortal words of REO Speedwagon…..

“I’ve forgotten what I started fighting for. It’s time to bring this ship* into the shore, and throw away the oars, forever.”

(*the “ship” is industrialized capitalistic civilization if that wasn’t obvious. Oh it was obvious? And explaining it ruined it for you and made you feel talked down to and now you’re disregarding this entire essay?! No, wait! I’m sorry I didn’t give you more credit!…….Oh, you’re just messing with me? You actually love this essay and are going to share it with all your friends AND quit your bullshit job to devote the rest of your life to taking down the Empire?????!!!! Well this is the best possible outcome I could have ever hoped for from a Medium essay)

If you travel to a National Park this Memorial Day, please REMEMBER that in order to “preserve” it in the first place, at some point all the Native peoples living there had to be “removed”, just like other species were, and the land and ecology suffered for it. Imagine shifting from the conservation of Nature to the restoration of the relationships that were obliterated by western white supremacist capitalist systems.

Here’s what happened when wolves were introduced back to Yellowstone….

And remember that we modern industrialized humans have been largely removed from the processes of Nature, from the roles we once played in keeping ecological balance and even in creating more biodiversity.

We can and must remember this.