Should have seen it coming. We went to work every day, like normal. We did our cogs in the machine jobs like we were supposed to. We worked our way up the ladders, we bought our houses and our cars and our color TVs. So focused were we on what we were supposed to be doing, the rules we needed to follow; so caught up with our own muck and troubles – most of our own creation – we didn’t see it coming.
We’d grown up with the threat of nuclear winter. Who amongst us has not sat outside at one time or another with a group of friends looking at the stars, wondering if we’d see the missiles coming? Wondering what it would be to look up and see annihilation from ground zero. If you were on the west most coast you also wondered if the shaking would finally tip you into the ocean; if you were in the south and east you also watched for storms that could blow you two counties over. So we focused on the smaller things because the big threats were too big.
We should have seen it coming. Most of us listened to the news, even after there was news, and fake news, and alternative facts, and just plain cuckoo conspiracy theory BS. We still listened when they said Climate Change, when they talked about rising oceans, melting icecaps, sinking cities, wildfires.
We went right on. When pandemic shut down the world. We didn’t learn anything, not as “the whole of humanity.” Humans remained pretty stupid, fingers in ears singing “la la la, I can’t hear you.” We set the recycling and landfill issues back 50 years with the number of take-out containers and online ordering. We looked away; we didn’t want to see it coming.
4,738,963 of us walked off jobs, what started as a strike went on to become a movement, a migration that picked up momentum as the cities began to empty. There wasn’t infrastructure or resources outside the cities to support us either. The wells were failing, and there were now earthquakes and tremors where we’d fractured the earth in search of oil. We started scanning the skies again. We didn’t want to know. That’s why we didn’t see it coming.
The greatest oxymoron there could possibly be: We are living in an extinction event. We sit on our porch, drinking coffee grown in Costa Rica and shipped by truck, bus, plane and finally car in our cups, made in China, sweetened with milk from factory farmed cows. The bees are gone, there is no honey for sweetener. We look at each other, thinking So this is where we are.
— Lkai
We’d grown up with the threat of nuclear winter. Who amongst us has not sat outside at one time or another with a group of friends looking at the stars, wondering if we’d see the missiles coming? Wondering what it would be to look up and see annihilation from ground zero. If you were on the west most coast you also wondered if the shaking would finally tip you into the ocean; if you were in the south and east you also watched for storms that could blow you two counties over. So we focused on the smaller things because the big threats were too big.
We should have seen it coming. Most of us listened to the news, even after there was news, and fake news, and alternative facts, and just plain cuckoo conspiracy theory BS. We still listened when they said Climate Change, when they talked about rising oceans, melting icecaps, sinking cities, wildfires.
We went right on. When pandemic shut down the world. We didn’t learn anything, not as “the whole of humanity.” Humans remained pretty stupid, fingers in ears singing “la la la, I can’t hear you.” We set the recycling and landfill issues back 50 years with the number of take-out containers and online ordering. We looked away; we didn’t want to see it coming.
4,738,963 of us walked off jobs, what started as a strike went on to become a movement, a migration that picked up momentum as the cities began to empty. There wasn’t infrastructure or resources outside the cities to support us either. The wells were failing, and there were now earthquakes and tremors where we’d fractured the earth in search of oil. We started scanning the skies again. We didn’t want to know. That’s why we didn’t see it coming.
The greatest oxymoron there could possibly be: We are living in an extinction event. We sit on our porch, drinking coffee grown in Costa Rica and shipped by truck, bus, plane and finally car in our cups, made in China, sweetened with milk from factory farmed cows. The bees are gone, there is no honey for sweetener. We look at each other, thinking So this is where we are.
— Lkai
Well, you tackled a HUGE HUGE topic and got off to a good start. Another twenty-nine chapters and we'll have the problem completely described. I feel that each sentence in this could be expanded into a doomsday poem. Let us continue to make beauty anyway, in whatever way is left to us. ---Macoff
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely: creation is the antidote for entropy and chaos.
DeleteWe are all so immersed in our own little worlds that seeing the big picture is almost impossible.
ReplyDeleteThis is sadly profound and real. So well articulated. Yes to Macoff, let's make beauty each moment we are given.
ReplyDelete