Actually Burning
Thursday at 7AM the morning sun burned a pallid orange. Wildfire smoke in the high atmosphere filters the sunlight. For us here in the Fox Valley it is an early sign of much more that is coming. In terms of climate the midwest is not far from Quebec where the fires burn. Imagine the small towns there. They are evacuating, everyone taking a few belongings in their vehicle hastening to leave ahead of the roiling smoke. Is the road passable?
With warming atmosphere and oceans, much more is to come, first in the southern regions, then in turn, in the mid-west.
In my later years I’ve not been a devotee of Plato. Ideals seemed ginned up illusions. Nietzsche wrote that Christianity was Plato-for-the-masses, a statement that is true in part. Mesmerized by an ideal, – Jesus, God, democracy, capitalism, the 2nd amendment, etc. it is too easy to spend life playing word games while the world burns. Actually burns.
The house is burning, not someone else’s home, but ours. The place where we live burns and we Americans are un-tethered. We continue living as we have always lived, habitually practicing behaviors that have transformed, generation by generation, “our house,” the planet into a tinder box, certain to succumb to temperature rise by co2 emissions. We are a unusually violent society. We insist on unlimited personal freedom, to own as much as we can afford (economic growth is sacred), traveling as often and as far as we desire (no limits of action) without a thought about consequences, eroding sustainability of every living organism. Yes, our life-style seems anything but violent. That is the problem isn’t it?
We are players in a globalized game. We will be the very last one’s to recognize the game for what it is. America,– “we stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.” (interview with Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Columbus, Ohio, February 19, 1998)
Those who
no longer believe
in God,
do not believe in nothing.
Far worse,
they now believe
in anything.
–Iris Murdoch
