A Requiem to the New American
Gary Null PhD
Progressive Radio Network, September 11, 2020
For the majority of people, we only fully understand the correctness of our choices after they reach their ultimate end. Right now, most our choices concern how we can avoid infection from the coronavirus. Behind the pandemic is angst over who will lead the country as if the less of two evils can be considered a viable option for a progressive and healthy future. In the meantime we are inundated with the contentious debate of systemic racism and the media’s delusional attention to the woke generation’s bible, White Fragility, that conjures a mirage that being born Caucasian imbibes you with the original sin of being a racist.
We are told we are all in these crises and socio-political ills together. Our government and federal agencies, such as the EPA, USDA, FDA and CDC, sing lullabies to comfort and assure us that they hold our best interests and well-being at heart. But the elite and political bureaucrats are already comfortably ensconced with incomes beyond their spending capacity, with entitlements that none of us will ever receive. And we are therefore expected to defer to them as the best and brightest, a privileged intelligentsia absent any wisdom, who are capable of making our decisions for us. Everything in life is under their control. But in truth, those among us who are unable to identify themselves among this global elite have no life raft in a sea of great white sharks.
Our once valued freedoms are controlled by Citizens United, the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act and in sundry mercurial agencies, such as Homeland Securities, the National Security Agency, the CIA and Justice Department. Nor is there a resilient and popular third political option or party to leverage against a national discourse that ultimately favors private interests over people.
What is missing from the discourse and popular narratives today is that which will eventually determine our future. From the Ethiopian peasant farmer to the oligarchs in the Hamptons and Silicon Valley, our futures will be victimized by a single issue being swept under the rug. And that is global warming. In fact, at this moment, the fundamental causes of anthropogenic activity fueling the devastating reports of wildfires, droughts and hurricanes doesn’t even warrant discussion in the media. If you believe this is a minor issue, here is a quick tour of the state of the planet during the past two weeks. It reveals everything that is being ignored as if there was no responsibility and no lessons to be learned from it.
At this moment California is having its worst wildfires ever as Death Valley breaks a heat record of 130 degrees F. Over 3 million acres (roughly 4,500 square miles) have already been lost along with 6,000 buildings; and the state is only mid-way into its fire season. Smoke plumes upwards to 50,000 feet, about 10 miles, are rising outside Fresno. Five Oregon towns were completely destroyed as other fires rage in Washington and outside Vancouver.
The mid-West had its first derecho, a fast-moving, long-lived wind storm, which carries the potential to rival the force of hurricanes and tornados; 10 million acres of cropland were destroyed. Consequently this year’s crop and grain yields may reach record lows. As water demands far exceed its availability, US agriculture is on the verge of collapse.
Elsewhere, there are 63,000 fires underway in Brazil, and fires in Siberia covered a region the size of Greece.
Recently we were informed that global ice melts have reached unprecedented speed. In just thirty years, 30 trillion tons of the Earth’s ice has been lost. Greenland’s ice fields, Reuters reports, has declined beyond recovery. Russia’s permafrost is rapidly melting and its just a matter of time before a massive release of the most serious greenhouse gas, methane. It was discovered that Arctic heating has now passed earlier worse case scenarios. And 60 percent of Antarctica’s ice shelves are fractured; in other words ice sheet calving is accelerating and will subsequently increase sea levels sooner.
If you live in any of the most wildfire prone states – California, Nevada, Oregon, Oklahoma, Idaho, Texas and Colorado, there is a high probability that within the next two years, the quality of your life will change dramatically. If you happen to live along the Gulf or in the southern Atlantic coastline, you will witness category 4 and 5 hurricanes and perhaps the first of a category 6 Superstorm. We can anticipate entire local economies collapsing as residents are forced to flee to other locations. To make matters worse, Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada and Idaho are on the fastest track to reach the zero point of no water.
Therefore we are in the era of the greatest environmental destruction in human history. Three of the most populous nations – China, India and the US – are also the world’s leading polluters. Together, these three nations account for two-fifths of the global population. Despite all of the talk and international climate conferences, virtually nothing is being done to reduce green house gas emission rates nor to rapidly mobilize strategies to transition towards renewable economic and technological alternatives. There continues to be a catastrophic failure in our leadership to even begin to comprehend that our current neoliberal economic system, with its constant need for capital and growth, more development and larger cities, that our collective actions and policies are placing our ecological systems and the planet into permanent hospice care.
As our nation’s dither in the toxic sludge of political correctness, the Arctic Circle and Antarctic melt, Siberia’s boreal forests and Greenland burn, the Amazon and Pacific coastal states are in flames. In several more months Australia will enter its fire season. There are massive migrations occurring in Africa and the Middle East. Everywhere ecological systems are becoming more fragile as environmentally friendly lands for agriculture are depleted for natural resources in the process.
It is long overdue that we ask hard questions. Do we as a species really care? The evidence suggests a loud and unequivocal “no.”
Do we really care to beat the increasing epidemics in cancer, diabetes, heart disease and childhood obesity? Instead of changing our dietary habits to protect the environment, we seemingly prefer to maim and kill ourselves with our forks and knives.
Do we care enough to change our utterly corrupt and captured duopolistic political systems at the federal, state and local levels? Hell no.
Do we turn off and cancel our biased mainstream media – Fox, MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, NPR and so many others? Clearly the answer is no.
Do we really care about the quality of children’s education despite the younger generations being functionally illiterate? Obviously not because all of our leading institutes are equally illiterate.
So when we glance over the state of the sorry state of human nature today, we should not be surprised that there is runaway climate change and a decaying environment. Our alienation within the carnival of our own mental fun house is unable to hear Gaia’s warning about drilling, extracting, mining, and polluting her organs. Rather than reflect deeply on the consequences of our actions, we contemptuously flip the natural world the finger and say, “I don’t give a damn about you or anyone else. I am the New American. We only care about ourselves, so go screw yourself.”
Yet for that small five percent who do care and are making conscientious personal and small group changes in their lives, they are the canaries in the coal mind. No matter how many share their truths with the larger public, they will be canceled because they bear a truth the masses refuse to hear about the pointlessness in their own lives and that of future generations.
At the end of the day, the only cries we will hear are those who will say, “Why me? Why today?” And we can respond “Why not?” You chose to disregard your imagination and the gifts of critical thought to consider the consequences of the choices you have made. Therefore, you are reaping what you have sowed.
