The End of Forever

As I age, I think periodically about “The End”. I know that in religious parlance, that End merely means a new beginning, either coming back as a rattle snake, or a cockroach, or lounging about on some cloud, playing a harp and chatting it up with Grandpa Inglis, or Shakespeare. But the other day, I read a very long “article” in the New York Times Magazine Section in its Sunday edition. That section devoted its entire magazine section to our coming climate disaster. In it, the authors describe another END, or, in this case, the likely end of humanity, as the climate changes our planet to the point that it is no longer habitable and we all just disappear like the dinosaurs—I guess that could be described as a sort of “climate change” also.

The gist of the article is that we had a chance, briefly, during the 1970’s, when we could have acted so as to minimize the damage to our planet from our climate change actions, but that we stepped aside and failed to act.  The US is not alone in this course of madness, but, had we acted then, we might have convinced the other major actors to go along to minimize the damage.  But we didn’t.

And so the fairy tale of Forever is now ending.

What do I mean by the fairy tale of forever?

Well, we humans have, I assume, always hated the idea of “endings”. And to counter the fact of Endings, we devised fairy tales and sold the fairy tales as substitutes for reality.  We call the fairy tales, organized religion.  The first “ending” we dealt with of course is the end of life thing. We all know life ends. We see it on a daily basis. Every time we step on a cockroach, or slap a bee to death, we understand that we have ended a life—a tiny one to be sure, but still, a life.

We know, when we slice into a piece of steak, or fry a piece of bacon, that once, that slice was part of a living creature that grazed in the grass, and also looked up on the stars. That creature stopped existing, so that we could eat that steak, or piece of bacon.

As we peruse the daily newspaper, we come across obituaries, that section we all love to read, as it speaks to folks who once inhabited the earth, but now occupy space underground, or in some ash container.  And, of course, our family members keep popping off every now and again, as reminders that life seems not to continue forever. No, it ends, always, for everyone, and every living thing on our poor benighted planet.

But to counter this notion of endings, we devised the fairy tale of populated clouds, and a fiery hell for those poor folks who do not act the way we instruct them to act. And because that particular fairy tale sold so well, we continue to devise fairy tales to cover whatever unpleasantness we continue to see up ahead.  The fairy tale about human folks hanging around on clouds seem relatively benign. I mean, it does grant authority over us to those charlatans who continue to tell us they know what’s ahead, after we die.  But that seems almost harmless when compared with the fairy tale about the Forever nature of our planet. The fairy tale is that our planet and its brothers and sisters out there in EverLand have always existed and will continue to exist forever.  Note, I ignore the patent silliness of the 6000 year tale by that crowd of idiot-savants who do idiotic things like build fake Arcs to demonstrate when humans and dinosaurs occupied the same space till the God thingie threw a lot of water at the planet.  No, even though the God-Creatures continue to cling to all manner of fairy tales about the creation of Earth and humankind, they seem to also like perpetuating the fairy tale that God will not allow Earth to die and thereby kill off his glorious creations.  No, they seem to see our planet as going on forever also.

But the main purveyors of the forever tale are the very ones seeking to hasten its ending—the big money crowd and the industrialists who are causing the central problem. See, there’s “gold in them thar hills”, and when there’s gold at issue, the big money crowd has no moral principles at all.  I can almost understand it when we look at, say, coal mining companies. I mean, they would/will need to go out of business altogether, unless some brilliant human can devise a way to use coal for some purpose that does not involve destroying the planet. And that goes for, say, Exxon, et al. And I guess the bankers (not known for moral principles) have too much capital invested in these deadly industries to abandon them.

So, since the big money crowd controls all politics everywhere on the planet, they can disable, or keep marginal, all actions to Save Our Planet. As the New York Times Magazine section makes clear, the world’s political structures could have acted during the 1970’s, when it became clear that we faced a cataclysmic future if we failed to act. And, of course, we did not act.  Whether we now face a 3 degree rise in global temperatures, or worse (anything over 2 degrees is highly dangerous to the future of our planet), or a 4-5 degree rise is now under debate, but we must understand that such rises mean the drowning of many island states, the disappearance of many coastal cities, including such places as New York City, Boston, San Francisco, etc.  But, the changes in temperature may well also spell the ending to many agricultural systems, as drought and temperature rises produce more desert than arable land.  It is clear that we cannot be specific as to how it will all end, or what delaying tactics might arise.

What is clear is that the purveyors of fairy tales continue their work to preserve their own short term profitability at the expense of rational man’s ability to delay or forestall the total destruction of our planet. That they will die also seems irrelevant to the powers that be, because they assume they will live out their precious lives in luxury, at the expense of their heirs, and future mankind in general.

It remains unclear whether it is already too late. But with a Trump administration well ensconced with full denial as its mantra, it is clear that nothing will be done any time soon.