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| Oggy must walk in old man crouch due to spinal arthritis |
One of the questions that needs answering is how to live with our modern comforts while not destroying the planet. The answer, I'm pretty sure, is that it isn't possible. It's basically like a gambler who has bet and lost the house trying to figure out a way to bet more. Or a shopper who has maxed out her credit card trying to spend more. How can it be done? The only answer is by getting more credit, by spending more of what you don't have or own...and that has now reached a global scale. Of course, not too many Kenyan refugees are reading this and unless you are a Doctors Without Borders volunteer then your electrified world is totally out of harmony with nature and you like it that way. I want to be positive but the possibility of owning iPods and gold based electronics without nasty consequences is too unrealistic even for my own twisted fantasy of living. See, my approach to the international insanity is to live in such a way that you would have to be offended. And then your mind might be in a position to realize that the modern world is living EQUALLY out of touch with reality. (I'll point out that EVERYONE IS TOO DUMB TO GET THE MESSAGE but my motives were pure.)
No, for some people to live in a future like Star Trek then most people will have to live in a world like Mad Max. That's the trade off. For every master there must be 20 servants. There can never be 21 masters and no servants. So it's a paradigm of servitude and exploitation that is in our nature and can't be expunged. It's a big game of King of the Hill like we used to play at Little Harbor elementary school, kids scrambling to the top of a plowed mountain of dirty snow in the December recess before Christmas break, our Star Wars toys wrapped in attic packages, hidden, noses red and running, mittens torn, boots squeaking, plaid pants wet with the salty runoff. We learn young to kick at those who reach for our leg, never to reach out and help. The recess monitors nodding in ignorant amusement as the children learn their hardest lesson: that only the select can stand at the top, that life is a competition and a savage struggle. Nearly 40 years later I question what I was taught but am helpless to unlearn it all and neutralized by the gigantic scale of the problem. 9 dying puppies in a cave made from flotsam. 500,000 Africans with no food or water. An oil industry determined to suck the earth dry and a populace content to fund and authorize or ignore it. Polar Bears needing air drops with survival food. Wolves plodding in silent, ageless stoicism. But communication now aided by satellites and gold from Peruvian mountains. We learn to rely on the bones of our past for nutrition. I carve my name like a hunter gatherer on the underside of this virtual cave. The Kenyan child clings to his mother's arm, dying. The puppy limps to an empty food bowl. The drought farmer sifts the dry soil. We learn to avoid consequences and embrace them.
"If the greater good is too lofty a subject to ponder then what does that mean about the common good?" Oggy Bleacher
