Ill fares the land, to hastening ill a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay
-Oliver Goldsmith
My daughter and I were on a visit to the famous Carlsbad Caverns National Park and as we got closer to park headquarters we noticed more and more evidence of the vast fire that had swept the Guadalupe Mountains months before. The series of wild fires that occurred over several years was devastating to the Southwest as millions of acres of forest, grassland and even desert went up in smoke. In normal situations such fires happen and in a few years a forest recovers. Desert grass and scrubland are not so easily replenished and the area around Carlsbad will be scarred for decades. In addition the droughts that have plagued the Southwest are being exacerbated by occasional rainy periods that cause brush to grow and then be dried out, providing tinder for the next big fire.
Fires are not our only problems. Droughts, floods, massive storms and blizzards are becoming the norm. We always had these, but they seem to be fiercer and more devastating. Pollution is a major problem in much of the world, and in this country we are exporting garbage and sewage to the poorer states. The country is studded with superfund sites, many of which may never be cleaned up. Radiation pollution is scattered from Hanford Site in Washington state and the Uranium waste piles in New Mexico to Three-Mile Island to Chernobyl and Fukushima. All one has to do to lose faith in our modern technological abilities is to view the Los Angles freeway, even outside of rush hour. We humans are rapidly making the planet into a dump, with acid seas and toxic smoke. On top of this we have always been at the mercy of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions (we in the Pacific Northwest are painfully aware of this.)
Now, with all of these problems, plus the dangers caused by epidemic (Ebola is back!) and arthropod-borne diseases that are increasing because of population expansion and global warming, in addition to ease of travel around the world, we in the United States have the most ill-equipped group of administrators and public officials that I have ever seen in my lifetime of over 70 years. They are proud know-nothings and we are to depend on them?
Well, this is a difficult time and I am not sure how it will turn out, but I don’t expect that the results of putting dummkopfs in charge is a good omen for humanity. I wish I did not have to be such a Cassandra (remember she was correct, but was not believed because Apollo had placed a curse on her for rejecting his advances — shades of #MeToo.)
They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshýd gloried and drank deep:
And Bahrám, that great Hunter--the Wild Ass
Stamps o'er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep.
-Omar Khayyam
Aside from the environmental concerns, which Obama had started to address and this “administration” is rapidly ignoring or making worse, we have the problem (actually not separable from the environment as we are all part of it, even well-heeled con-men) that our country is divided more than at any time, save perhaps the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights marches, since the Civil War. Civility is down the drain and even here in the Pacific Northwest there are more incidents of white women (oddly enough they seem to be more common in these incidents) or men shouting at somebody speaking Spanish or some other language to go back to their own country, or some would-be alt-right young man (usually) spray painting swastikas on a school. It has altered my own thinking a bit because I now have difficulty seeing such behavior as explainable by just ignorance and I often get angry about such breaches of the public order. I have used profanity more often in speaking about these people and I am at a loss as to how to hold them in the light or bestow compassion on them, as my Quaker-Buddhist-Stoic philosophy would indicate that I should do. It is doubly difficult because they are hurting not just me, but thousands, perhaps even millions, of other people around the world and indeed the planet itself. I can possibly forgive a transgression against me, or at least refuse to retaliate, but how do I forgive torture against someone else, or environmental crimes? Would this not be the height of arrogance on my part? Perhaps I can feel pity for them because the seem to lack a real personality (a “soul” if you will) and are unbelievably boring. They have also sold themselves to an idol of gold.
I believe that conflict should be avoided, but not at all costs. Non-violent opposition can be a powerful tool, although on occasion (such as with the Nazis) peaceful confrontation may be impossible. Such violence should ideally be rare and never applied lightly, as even the best of causes rapidly degenerates when deadly force is used. It is, however, dangerous to appease or enable evil, lest we wind up with a society that resembles those in 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale. Evil is a result of a darker tendency to rely on basic drives, tribalism and a supporting Randian philosophy of justified selfishness (“You have to look out for number one.”) Even if there is no angry deity to satisfy, civil rules are vital to the functioning of society and thus need no cosmic significance to justify them. In this context evil is very real and can be very destructive. Probably the worst aspect of this evil is intolerance of other’s belief system. I, for what it is worth, harbor the view that as long as a person is not causing harm to others (this leaves out Fascists), it is none of my business what they believe. I am not required to convert them to my views and should be respectful of reasonably held beliefs, even if mine are quite different. Perhaps they are right and I am wrong. Nobody made me God or even put me in charge as God’s emissary, but some people, even if they do not believe in God or gods or goddesses, seem to think so about themselves. This may be a flaw in the human psyche, which does not serve us well in the Twenty-first Century. In our pluralistic society we absolutely need respect and tolerance to survive. The one thing we cannot tolerate is hate of the other — foreigners, women, LGBTQ, blacks, Hispanics, or whatever. We need everybody on board for us to endure as a species. We simply cannot afford bigotry.
Is there hope? Yes, but the next few years will determine if our Republic can withstand such a concentrated attack on decency and practical problem solving, or whether our legacy will be a destructive fight in which a few fat cats sit at the top and watch the rest of us struggle to survive. The rest of the planet seems to be also seeing a resurgence of tribalistic nationalism. The early elections here suggest a possible correction at the ballot box. On the other hand, it may be too late to address Global Warming, other than to mitigate it at some level. Even if we are able to turn the society around it will certainly be fraught with some degree of corruption and incompetence (humans are fallible and prone to error), but it should not be a total capitulation to the worse angels of our nature and to the nihilism of the current Republican Party that we have now. It almost seems to me that people in the battleground states looked at Clinton as a slightly corrupt female politician and said, “Why not go the full monty and get a totally nakedly corrupt male?”
I am a scientist and I deal in empirical data, but I will have to say that for impact you need a poet to demonstrate a reality forcibly.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
-Robert Frost