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?
We used to sing of the seven seas. Those songs will have to be re-written, for we're short one.
This way of life--our koyaanisqatsi--can't continue. We just haven't got enough planet. We must, individually and collectively, turn a mighty big corner if we wish our species to have a habitable home. Whether or not we can, and will, I don't know. We are remarkably adaptable, but also colossally stubborn and superstitious. Were I a trader, I'd probably short us.
But who knows? We've been lucky before, diving into the crapper and pulling up diamonds.
Still, if we make it through this century with even a marginally livable planet, it won't be a matter of our usual shit-pot luck. Nor can we expect gods or spacemen to drop to the stage in the final act. Such persons, if they ever were, have long written our sorry asses off.
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.
Like I said, who knows? We're not really stupid, though we pretend we are so that we can have friends. We might just have the smarts and stones to save ourselves and our children and all the tasty plants and critters we crave. Maybe, just maybe, I and the plants and critters and gods and spacemen will be pleasantly surprised.
Well, that's all I've got right now. As you were.
Or, better yet, not.
Yr brother,
Human Being