I know that human beings are capable of profound compassion, and hideous cruelty. I have witnessed this first hand in a land far away in time and place, Vietnam. In the foul jungles, forests, and sawgrass plains, replete with 'wait-a-minute' vines and 'fuck-you' lizards, I learned the best and worst of humanity, sometimes within a single day. Humans can be filled with compassionate self-sacrifice and then erupt with murderous rage.
I found that humans, for all of our profound learning and thinking, are utterly blind to the world around us. We create a world from our minds that we take to be reality. WE project our beliefs into the desert, the jungle, the arctic, and the oceans and then act accordingly. In peace and war, we believe we know what is happening because we can put words and concepts to things we observe and do. And yet, what we believe to be true, and what is true are two different things. We have a belief that war solves problems, when the truth is that it never has. We believe that the earth was placed here for our use and convenience and this is untrue.
We pretend that our actions are forgivable because, “WE ARE HUMANS AND ARE BELOVED BY OUR GOD’. We have created this monstrous set of lies based on various religions that proclaim us as ‘special’ and therefore our murder of this planet and each other, is sanctioned and approved.
We believe that animals and plants exist solely for us, and do not have lives independent of our avarice or our need. We reach out and take whatever we need, and many things that we do not need, only want. In doing so, we tell ourselves that it is ‘ok’, that somehow what we disturb will grow back, repopulate, replenish. Somehow. We tell ourselves “God is on our side and put these animals and plants here for us to use as we see fit”. Why isn't it possible for humans to understand that all beings are put here by the Creator, and that all beings have an equal right to existence?
With the hypocrisy of true fools, humanity destroys, and then creates zoos to preserve the remnants of those that survive. The cute and cuddly, the ferocious predator, the odd duck are stored in tiny cells and we tell ourselves this is compassion of the supreme human over the unfortunate ‘others’. We tell ourselves that we are merely holding these precious beings in order to save them for future generations. WE tell ourselves that we are good and godlike, and that our munificence is because of our higher intellect. We tell ourselves that as long as we can keep them locked in small cages, it is ok to kill those that are free. We can kill 2,000 in the wild, because we have 1 in a cage.
Somehow humanity lives a life of utter contempt for those creatures that comprise our world. We see only our cities, our automobiles, and our wondrous sky- scrapers as the height of achievement and fitting monuments to humanity. We tell ourselves that we are designed and approved by God, the Creator. We worship, we pray, we pat ourselves on the back for our spiritual transcendence and our worldly intelligence. In so doing, we fail, utterly, to witness the majesty of nature. We fail utterly to appreciate the marvelous intricacy of every living thing. Each being, from Whale to mink; Cod to Gorilla; Fern to plankton is a wondrous product of millions of years of evolution. Each being is uniquely suited to its niche in the planetary complexity of life. Each being, from virus to hairy vetch, is a work of art and wondrous majesty. Each living being is a glorious exclamation of a living Creator. Humans are only part of this creation.
Human beings are blinded by hubris. We, in fact, invent religions to fortify our greed and to sanctify our rapacious impulses to murder and indifference. Rather than see the handprints of God in every living creature, we strut around, as foolish children in a room full of toys, running about, sampling everything, understanding nothing.
Brazenly, wantonly, brutally, stupidly we kill all of our fellow creatures on this planet.
The truth of this breaks my heart.
The world is on the verge of losing the magnificent Polar Bear. Thousands are starving or drowning because humanity has polluted the world with greenhouse gases and now the arctic sea ice is thinning and disappearing. The Polar Bear cannot exist without polar ice, so extinction is most probable. With the loss of this magnificent being, there will be a corresponding loss in every being on this world. WE are all related. What happens to the Polar Bear happens to humanity. This world is far beyond the petty insecurities and unconscious greed of humans, it is a complex interrelationship of all living species. As beings are lost, the complex web begins to unravel.
There may in fact be an “Armageddon”, but it is not based on that pathetic scribble of humanity the bible or the Koran. It will be a supreme punishment of humanity for what we have done to this planet and all of our living relatives. Humanity is to blame for unconscionable blindness and indifference. Humanity will pay for this. The religions of Christianity and Islam, Buddhism and Hindu, are all man created beliefs. They are not based in any form of cosmic truth. What is true is that humanity is part of this planet, not above it, not in ‘command’ of it. We belong here, along with all other beings, and we are no more important, nor no less, than every other living thing. So when we wantonly destroy our fellow creatures, we also destroy ourselves. There is a balance to the universe, all things belong, all things have a right to exist. No one being can be allowed to desecrate all of the others.
Maybe this life is a test. Maybe it is a test to see if human beings can retain our wondrous intellect and curiosity, and yet achieve harmony with other living beings. If so, we have failed utterly.
Polar Bears are dying...and so are we.
Polar bears living on thin ice after record temperatures
John Vidal, environment editorFriday December 16, 2005The Guardian
"This could be the hottest year ever recorded, posing a threat to Arctic wildlife including polar bears, ice-dwelling seals and several forms of vegetation, according to UN scientists collating data from across the world..."
No comments:
Post a Comment