Dear Human Beings

[kpete]

Dear Human Beings
by Crashing Vor
Sun Jun 20, 2010 at 06:08:52 AM PDT

Forgive me for being so formal. I understand your preference for more intimate nicknames like "New Yorker" and "Virginian" and "American," but this message is rather important. I thought formality was called for.

Often in the past, you have been given signs, portents, suggestions gentle and otherwise, that your way of life is not sustainable, that you live what the Hopi would call koyaanisqatsi, crazy life. Nearly as often, you have received symbols of second, third, thousandth chances, from the painfully ironic nailing up of a Galileean carpenter to the white buffalo calf born on the farm of an otherwise unremarkable white family in Janesville.

You've watched lakes the size of nations turn to deserts and grandmothers plucked from flooded cities by helicopters. The consequences of your lives are not hidden.

Now you are watching an ocean murdered. Is the picture sufficiently clear, or are captions required?
....................


If somehow we're here and reasonably well to greet the 22nd Century, it will be because we made hard choices, even--gasp--sacrifices, because we looked past our own generations and nations.

................

Yr brother,

Human Being
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/6/20/877669/-Dear-Human-Beings

[midnight]

1. I saw a before and after shot of the Gulf, and Crashing Vor is right on the money

when he says: "Now you are watching an ocean murdered."

[Child_Of_Isis]

2. Is the picture sufficiently clear

I don't think so. The major players were yachting & golfing yesterday while the people of the gulf watched oil burn.

I think 'the people' get it. But they have been pushed so far down in survival mode they have lost all illusions about having any say in the matter.

[gtar100]

3. Yep. That about sums it up.

They're worried about saving a company and its stock price while an ocean dies. That's just fucked. I'm sure when they're burning in hell, they'll be complaining it's the liberals' fault along with those wacky environmentalists.

I agree, I think a lot of people do get it. And those with wealth and power are squirming in their seats right now. They don't say it, but it's in the undercurrent. Because if the Gulf disaster isn't the end of big oil, it portends the end of modernity.

[kestrel91316]

4. Americans believe that everyone ELSE needs to make sacrifices so

THEY can keep living high on the hog.

And plenty with that attitude are right here on DU.

[Child_Of_Isis]

5. Our corporations & elected officials live high on the hog.

I don't know of many working people who do. Everybody I know is in survival mode. Most of us were born in survival mode. We work, pay our bills, raise our children, and try to live right.

[kestrel91316]

7. You haven't seen the resident DU Braggart Section rear its ugly head.

Plenty of folks here in McMansions and driving SUVs and sneering at us Little People.......

[Laelth]

6. Beautifully said. k&r for the sad truth. n/t

:dem:

-Laelth