I heard a fleeting comment on a documentary a few days ago and as soon as the words filled my ears and found meaning I was fidgety with an annoyance that made me bite my bottom lip to muffle the anger that was desperate to realise life (even if there were only two people in the room to be feel to it!).
It was not the fault of the words, I cannot beset positioned letters, they are innocent and benign in their infancy. They are merely shuffled into some sort of order by the mesh of wires and tissue of the brain from which they are plucked. It was the mouth from which the were given life, the brain from which they were born: the orderer of the words. Yes, with him I CAN be angry. With him I AM angry. The words that were spat from this man's mouth followed the theme 'Environmental concern is only a middle class preoccupation'. The muffling was futile. The anger was won, and rightfully so I feel!
Perhaps from the way that I have explained the scene makes it sounds as though my anger, once broken free from it's suppression, tore in wails through the house: dissolved disagreement to dust and shredded into slivers of silence any opposition that hiccuped into the neutral air. It's just the closed thinking that angered me, the product of a 'modern society' where 'concern' is a fashion statement and 'health' is the product of celebrity worship: a distraction from an immoral and failing reality.
The government give us assumed power and control of the things little that fill our lives, that decorate the spheres in which we are enclosed, yet the things that are universal, the things that transcend race, income and societal segregation are the things that we have little control over and are the things that will cause every life upon earth to suffer: animals and humans as one. Hidden atrocities such as chem-trails: the chemicals showered from the wings of planes - that dissipate in all their heady toxicity into the blue only to descend upon the unknowing - to fill the lungs of the innocent and vulnerable: the 'poor'; the 'rich'; the 'upper class', 'middle class' and 'working class'. Humans are humans and humans are animals. One is not exempt from the toxic hedonism of modern society simply because one can afford to brush their bleached white veneers with the dust of a coral reef severed by hand from the shallows of the Pacific ocean or lace ones hair with sap from the trees of Amazon skyscrapers. It doesn't work like that. That is not concern. That is hypocrisy. In this sense I suppose I agree with this man and his view of 'preoccupation'. What I disagreed with was the way that he made it seem that this was all that environmental concern is - that the middle classes are where it is born and where it dies, where it begins and ends.
We need to avoid existing as a flock of misty eyed sheep within a misty eyed bundle directed towards a unified unknown: a heard of similarity
following a well trodden path deepened by past attempt and
failure. Something drastic is needed to make a change. We need to stop and think about things around us - the real things: the things beneath the pavement, beneath the foundations of our homes, beneath the blanket of concrete that separates us from reality. How the world is exploited, how destruction, and
environmental desecration has become a common denomentor present within most house holds, every town, every city and every county on our small little island. An Island choked by pollution: the intoxicating fumes of human greed that seem to muffle the cries of the earth that has born us. The further we delve into 'modernism' (a word tainted by delusional positivity), the further we jostle our way towards 'progression' and the more extreme the suppression of the world around us and beneath our feet becomes, the more society seems to delude itself into denying those cries. We become blinded. Our fundamental, inextricable and biological binding
within the earth as an organism and a cohesive ecosystem has faded from the minds of those by whom we are controlled and by those that hold the power and the ability to provoke the saving change.
I almost feel as though the whole of civilization needs to wipe the
slate, stained with the scars of death, poverty, global disaster and poison, clean.
We need to start from the very beginning and exist in a world in which we
integrate, we heal and we nourish the world in the way that it nourishes us. We
should understand the concept of balance, of equality of reciprocal empathy yet
we only see the concepts of hedonism and greed. Money. Money needs to be
abolished. Capitalism needs to be abolished. Development needs to be abolished.
How can an economy solely based upon growth ever be sustainable? In order for
growth to take place, the organism seeking growth has to have something vulnerable to
exploit, something by which it is fed: this is the earth. Much to our detriment and to the
detriment of animals - our equals, and the earth - our creator. I fear that the human race is directed towards a catastrophic
ending. In actual fact, in relation to time, the human race is quite inconsequential within the large expansive life of the earth yet we will be the thing to
which its life will face unnecessary death.
We, the human race, are a mere blot
of ink upon the virgin sands of the once most pristine shores. Shores caressed by the heaving
and dragging waves that stroke it’s sands with an admiration of it’s
preciousness, not poison it’s waters and stir its ashes as the human race insists.
Can’t you see it?
I can. I can see the building of towers so tall, we rise into the air, elevate
ourselves nearer and nearer into the stratosphere, titillate the edge of
impossibility, until we reach the brink of human power, simply to prove to
ourselves that we are dominant, or to state our dominance to each other.
‘We have now laid
claim to this land. It is ours’ we will say.
'That drowning of life, the
distinguishing of beauty – that was merely inconsequential. It is not of
relevance to us. We are exempting, we of our evangelical knowledge, we are
celestial beings, we are in touch with the higher powers', we will say. 'We are
here for a purpose'. We will say. 'We must be'. We will say.
We will reach a ‘pinnacle’ of destructive
accomplishment, blind to the reality of our ways. Whilst trying to delude ourselves of our morality, trying to exempt ourselves from immorality. I can see air so thick . I can see waters saturated with the products of human greed - the oceans that created us. I can see the earth shattering into dank and grey fragments
of it’s once abundant and verdant former self.
'This is us. This is what we have
done', we will say. 'This is the truth of
power and greed'. We will say.
Only it will be too late for anything
said.
