Tuesday, June 15, 2010

I can't take it anymore

I try not to read or follow the news. I definitely stay as far away from politics as I can. Still, no one can live in a complete vacuum. As such I am aware of the oil spill in the gulf. I am going to say something in response to this tragedy. I don't care that it might not be reasonable. I don't care that it might not make common sense. I just don't care. This is not political, because as you would know if you knew me I no longer can tell the difference between our political parties and don't have even the tiniest amount of faith in any party or politician. OK here goes:

I am green. I guess I was green before I knew there was such a thing. I identify more with the Sierra Club than I do with the country club. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, more than that I literally grew up living in the wilderness. I guess you could say my dad is one of the last remaining mountain men. It's only been through living so far away from there for so many years that I've begun to realize just what wilderness means and how important it is to me that it continue to exist and that it be protected.

I have tried in the past to conform to the religious right and the conservative politics that I thought were my "Christian" duty. I couldn't do it. I don't care how much sense it makes. I don't care if conservatism can be successfully won and argued in a logical debate. I just don't care. I don't care that I'm having a knee jerk, bleeding heart, tree hugging, save the whales, idealistic reaction. I honestly don't care. You can make all the arguments you like about the necessity of offshore drilling or drilling in Alaska. I heard them all. Heck I've argued them myself. They may even be good arguments. I don't care.

I'm not interested in logic. I'm not interested in what's best for our country or our economy. I don't even care if the result is we all revert back to 3'rd world living conditions because we can't sustain our way of living without raping the land. To HELL with our way of living. I mean that literally, because I honestly believe that's where God will send our way of living at the last day.

In Genesis 1 God told our ancestors to "be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air, for every living thing that moves on the face of the Earth. (The Message)". For too long certain elements of Christianity have heard the traditional King James type translation of that verse and have used it as an excuse to exploit God's good works of nature for their own advancement without any thought to protecting, respecting and cherishing it as the thing of beauty and grandeur that it is.

I think we Christians ought to be sold out for a few things. Not everyone can do everything of course, but to the point of personal sacrifice and beyond here are some of the types of things I think we ought to give our lives for.

1. Fighting Aids in Aftica.
2. Fighting poverty all over the world.
3. Fighting racism in our own hearts and minds and in our own back yards.
4. Standing in solidarity with the poor and persecuted all over this world.
5. Working for reconciliation between ethnic groups, religious groups, and other groups that need it.
6. Reconciliation with first-nations.
7. Standing against corporate greed and consumerism in favor of the environment.

Ok. Just had to get that off my chest. Now I'm off to figure out how to put some action to all this talk.

3 comments:

Lexrst said...

I am reminded of the words of the great Carl Sagan regarding the image of Earth as seen from space (seen here):

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Carl Sagan; May 11, 1996 (emphasis mine)

Dan G said...

That's good. Sagan's observations are so poignant and there is so much truth there. Endless cruelties... frequent misunderstandings... eager to kill... fervent their hatreds. Those are such common threads in the history of our species.

Why are we so bent on our own destruction and so deaf to the voices of blood that cry out from the ground?

What would I do without a story that made some sense of it? A narrative that winds through each age of the earth and brings meaning to each fragment of the whole.

When I look into the sky at night I am overwhelmed, but not by loneliness and despair at the final black deadness that awaits our cosmos. No, I am surprised by hope.

Anonymous said...

Hi, I am from Australia.

Please check out these related references on the non-humans and the politics of peace.

www.fearnomorezoo.org

www.dabase.org/p2anthro.htm

www.dabase.org/not2.htm