Nature was positively glorious today ...
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Including a close encounter with a grunting large male alligator, ospreys, baby ospreys, butterflies, parrots, flowers ... and the glorious blue sky above.
Nature accomplishes at least a billion things every single day which are more impressive than everything that humankind has accomplished over the last 10,000 years. I encourage everyone to spend their time in the living Universe and abandon, as much as is possible, the dead technological universe.
The bald eagles have left. The two parent eagles and their three babies have left their nest in Largo and migrated to the North. Parting is such sweet sorrow. I followed these eagles from their first appearance (back in September of 2008) until all three baby eagles had left the nest (just a few weeks ago) and now they are gone.
Certainly the bald eagles will return in September and this glorious process will begin all over again. Perhaps the population of bald eagles will be larger next year than this year.
Did you know that previous generations of Americans would kill the bald eagles as a nuisance? That same generation of Americans nearly drove the bisons extinct, did drive the passenger pigeons extinct, and exterminated all of the Native American civilizations (though Native Americas still remain, they have lost their land, their languages, their culture, and their tribes cling to life in the same desperate manner as the endangered animals).
So I must ask: Why are humans so very terrible in their behavior toward each other, Nature and every other species on the planet?
The same horrendous thought processes which justified all of the killing and environmental destruction and pollution of the past still persist today. Although conservatives will still voice and defend these unhealthy, destructive attitudes, liberals still engage in the same.
Americans are consuming 25% of the world's resources. 300 million people, on a planet of 6.7 billion, are consuming 1/4th of the planet's resources.
This isn't the behavior of an intrinsically good people. Nor is the evil behavior of only a small segment of the American population. It takes the consent and cooperation of 300 million people to consume 25% of the planet's resources.
The liberals won't stop this greed and gluttony. To do so would mean sacrificing all of our wealth, our luxuries, our sacred consumerism, our greed, our gluttony, our privileged status, and our ownership of the entire planet.
That's too great a sacrifice to ask even good people. That's too great a sacrifice for the evil to even contemplate.
But it must and will inevitably end. Inequalities of this sort are unsustainable. Americans are going to become impoverished in the years ahead and we should accept poverty.
Poverty would serve Americans very well.
I am very much in favor of poverty. On a planet with finite resources there is no excuse whatsoever for anyone to become wealthy. Call it socialism of communism if you wish ... but capitalism is dead and it has destroyed the Earth. If humankind values wealth more than survival our species will certainly go extinct.
David Mathews
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