Taking off from the news that Bush has appointed a former lobbyist for a big-game trophy hunting group to be head of the Fish & Wildlife Service, and drawing on the recent article in the
Guardian, Harris writes
You and I and all of us are not the privileged product of millennia of human improvement. We do not occupy a privileged luxury box from which we can view the mistakes of the past from above as they parade for our amusement. We are on the ground, in the dust, and making the same short-sighted decisions, this time on a fantastically grander scale.
More after the flip.
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Y'know, some days I honestly don't see any mechanism in American society capable of even recognizing the terrific, fundamental cruelty being done to our future, much less addressing it. Hell, the most tenuous grip on reality has become irrelevant to mainstream dialogue on a stunning variety of topics, often even considered suspicious, anti-American, or (perhaps worst of all) unrighteous.\<p\>
The very best people I know in this country are too often consumed merely with trying to slow down the lunatics. Energy that should be spent putting out global fires is being wasted refighting the Enlightenment. And giant chunks of a properous populace with no goddammed excuse is genuinely, truly, sincerely more concerned with the voting on a TV talent show than voting for their actual government.\<p\>
...\<p\>
You and I and all of us are not the privileged product of millennia of human improvement. We do not occupy a privileged luxury box from which we can view the mistakes of the past from above as they parade for our amusement. We are on the ground, in the dust, and making the same short-sighted decisions, this time on a fantastically grander scale.\<p\>
What disturbs me this morning, other than my own part in the waste (which remains large, as it must be for anyone living in the highest-impact society yet designed), is a growing sad realization:\<p\>
Suppose for a moment that an international movement began with the genuine potential to start pulling humanity back from the precipice. Just imagine it, briefly. Let a few details of its shape and scope and necessities bounce around in your brain for a few seconds.\<p\>
And now let's consider: if such a movement actually existed, would America's government, media, and populace be likely to join?\<p\>
Or would this most heavily-armed nation in human history -- the one where an advocate of killing rare species for fun is currently about to become director of a key wildlife post -- be vigorously, furiously opposed?
He perfectly captures the issues here. The drumbeat of the news about the environment should terrify all of us, but it can't break through the noise generated all around us in the "American Idol" culture where everything must be prepackaged and commodified.
So my questions are these: is all lost? Are we really on such a downward spiral that we can't pull out? What will it take to pull out? How can we begin to rebuild toward a liveable world for my daughter and all the rest of our children?