“The ruling elites, despite the accelerating and tangible ecological collapse, mollify us, either by meaningless gestures or denial.” Chris Hedges

It begins really early for us. Our parents spare us from harsh facts when we are very young. When Uncle Fred suddenly dies and we ask about him, we are told, “Uncle Fred had to go away for a long time and we’re not sure when we’ll see him again.” Bad news gets sweetened when the truth is deemed to be far too upsetting, which is also much easier on our parents.

Happiness becomes the sought after goal and its absence is to be avoided at all costs. It doesn’t take long for this to become the dance we do the rest of our lives. We transition from being told about Fred to telling ourselves similar deceptions.

The Buddha approached this dilemma from the other end. He taught that our lives are filled with unhappiness and the major deception is not to understand the temporary nature of all things, including ourselves. He taught that incorporating this truth into our lives is the true path to happiness, a path that can liberate us from the misguided, one dimensional expectation caused by our clinging to a lie. 

I am not sure the most valuable lessons come to us without doing any work, internal work. It’s the unpleasant stuff that is our teacher. The stories that are the most difficult to hear, have the most precious insights waiting for us. Mistakes and missteps are how we learn. 

At some point in all our lives, we are shocked to find out what actually happened to Fred and I think it is a pivotal moment. It sets each of us on our own paths and some of us will eventually come upon the bottomless chasm of the truth, while others will keep looking to reaffirm the original story about Fred going away for a long time. 

I have a problem.

My most important allegiance is to my young grandson, who, at some point in his chronological progression, will discover my writing, a strategy I haven’t quite figured out yet, but I will.  Ultimately, he is my audience, so I have no interest in compromising my writing in order to acquire more contemporary eyeballs. Trust me, I am in no way being dismissive, as I am truly grateful for your attention. However, there are strategies that should be followed in social media, if gaining and maintaining an audience is your objective. If I thought for one minute I was being disingenuous just to capture your attention, I’d retire from this endeavor.

The parents of people my age lived through the Great Depression and it marked them in ways I don’t profess to understand. It was a time filled with fear and hopelessness and in many ways the evolution of the Middle Class owes its origin to then, an antidote to that dark time. With World War II, America began to flex its muscle, ultimately giving birth to the perfect home, with its white picket fence and parents propagating the myth of Happy Endings. Television, a technological miracle and a boxed member of nearly every household, shared tales of plastic people, tattooed with smiles, living a trouble-free existence. In the Dream of America, everything was possible.

We have been slowly waking up from that dream, emotionally ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of our actions, fostering a kind of dangerous denial, blindly hugging that fairy tale of endless possibility. At the same time, the cracks have grown into wrenching schisms. There has been tremendous focus on individual freedom, with African Americans fighting for their birth right, concurrent with women’s insane struggle for equality and control over their bodies, both long overdue. 

In the midst of the endless dances within, America has trodden the frayed path of global dominance, one in a long line of pretenders to the temporary thrown of empire. Our national God is the politics of righteousness and all must bow to our military and financial prowess. We have been acting as if we are aloof from the world, making the natural world a slave to our whims.

My problem is what I see and the certainty of what is to come, trying to find a vocabulary that is honest, absent distortion and one that brings you along with me. I don’t want to be a tsunami warning that forces people to run for their lives, without taking the time to see what’s coming, a moment of realism that shunts the dream aside. 

We are a very self-centered, vain country, an age old affliction of all empires, infecting every one that has come before us. Over time, dominant cultures have become increasingly efficient at achieving their ends, also shortening their reign, something none of us want to look at either. There were never obstacles that couldn’t be conquered, until now.

My direction of choice is ass backwards, looking at where I am and exploring how I got here, a strategy easily extrapolated to incorporate all of us, a blessing or curse of longevity. 

Now that we are approaching the end of this story, I should tell you what prompted this particular episode. At the top, I quoted an extraordinary journalist by the name of Chris Hedges, who is not a fake news charlatan. Amongst other things, he was the NYT bureau chief in the Middle East for a bunch of years. I always look forward to his pieces. He pulls no punches, a bruising pinch on the cheek for any dreamer. In a way, he still looks for a happy ending, if you could call it that. He sees the only way out as one of revolution, overthrowing the power structure that will never willingly let go. This will not happen.

The climate catastrophe is a runaway freight train on a track, hopelessly contorted at the end, guaranteeing a wreck of unimaginable proportions. It is a looming crisis of incredible magnitude. Addressing it effectively requires a level of global cooperation that is non-existent. Hedges builds a devastating case against the strangle-hold the ruling elites have on us all. My God, just look at the news on any day and it is blatantly obvious how we have trivialized our existence, unable to see past today.

My grandson will eventually read this story, some time off in the future. He will be living in a world transformed by our ineptitude. Sea rise will have changed the geographic landscape dramatically. Weather forecasts will be quite different from today. The natural world will be readjusting to the loss of many species, animal, plant and insect. Perhaps, his generation will come together in an effort to rearrange the priorities of the global family of nations, but it will not happen in time to mitigate what is to come. 

I don’t think being realistic is negative, any more so than wishing for  a Happy Ending is totally naive and unachievable. I think both are possible, while the latter is big and the former is small. We always have a choice as to how we want to live our lives in the world, regardless of what it looks like.