I'm Not Scared- I'm Just Sad

Originally posted July 10/2007 on "Allison Wonderland"


Not to be a pessimist, but do you ever just stop and go, "What the hell is WRONG with people?"

Not the people who take 12 items into the "10 items or less" lane at the grocery store (and really, shouldn't it be "10 items or fewer?). Not even the guy who wouldn't let you merge that one time, the one who kept his car at the exact speed to stay right beside you until you ran out of lane. He pisses me off, too, but that's not what I'm talking about.

I mean People with a capital P, humanity in general. Do you just stop and go, "What have we done?"

I guess I can be a bit more specific than that. "Western" society is what pisses me off. I put that in quotation marks because it's not just the West- it's like a disease, sperading all over the world, consuming everything in its path. History shows us a repeating cycle of the rise and fall of powerful emipres; the thing is, when this culture falls, it's taking the entire effing planet with it. And that ticks me off.

We're like locusts. Oh, we'll get pissed at a swarm of giant grasshoppers when they descend and eat our crops, but we do the same thing on a global scale.

"Oooh, look, a beautiful rainforest, brimming with wildlife, botanical wonders and tribes who still live in relative harmony with the land! Let's strip it and grow BEEF!"

"Hey, that group of folks there don't even have air conditioning! Let's improve their lot, kill their land and leave them in debt for the rest of time!"

"Extinction? Nah, that has nothing to do with the fact that we're ripping up forests and building shopping centres, highways and subdivisions... polar bears are dying? Has nothing to do with global warming... which isn't our fault, anyway..."

"No, their lives will be better if they spend 14 hours a day making wallets, shoes and dolls for our dollar stores- really! Fourteen cents an hour is great pay!"

I guess it's a product of "progress", and we can't exactly go back. We have medicines that save lives, and I'll be the first to admit that I wouldn't go back and raise Simon in an age of smallpox and polio if I had the chance. More of us are on the planet now than there have ever been before, and, thanks to the things that we think make our lives better (ie- easier), every one of us is taking more out of the Earth than we ever have before. And you can't blame "emerging" countries like India and China for wanting what we've got; sure, their billions of people will overload the planet when they all have 2 cars, but we sort of set the precedent, didn't we?

Some people say it's too late. They say that Al Gore (God love him) and his sort are giving us false hope when they tell us to use cold water for our laundry an turn off the computer when we're not home. They say that, unless we can not only eradicate the use of fossil fuels in our lives, but convince those billions of people "over there" that it's in their best interest (culturally and economically) to do the same... we're buggered, friends.

We were given so much. I can't blame our ancestors for wanting to overcome the diseases and dangers they faced in their world... I just wish it could've been different.

I friggin' hate the industrial revolution.





(Just to clarify: I think most people, as individuals, have a lot of good in them, even if they can't find it, or I can't see it. It's humanity as a whole that's the disease. Hell, maybe salmonella-causing bacteria are nice as individuals, too.)