The Title of the Blog - Part 12

I know, this should be part eleven, in the string, but I don't seem to have part eleven saved on my home computer. Might have it at school, might just have things mislabeled - who knows. If eleven is at school, I'll post it next week. If this one's really eleven, such is the way of the world.

When today's column was originally published in The Bachelor, it was subtitled as Dusch's manifesto, having come out just after the Unabomber's manifesto was published in the NY Times & the Washington Post. Guess my environmental ideas echoed his in the eyes of The Bachelor's editors.

So be it...

We are being neutered. If you’ve picked up Time or Newsweek or watched the nightly news recently, you knew this, though. Lately scientists have been finding that our better life through chemical living might just lead to an infertile life through lowered sperm counts. In Finland and New York City and France and other places around the world, average sperm counts in males have dropped almost fifty percent in the last few decades. If they drop like that again man will be nearly infertile in thirty years. Those are your sons and mine. No grandkids to expect or even to hope for after that. Ever…and it’s our own faults. Most of those scientists are now thinking that this reduction is due to massive amount of chemicals in our lives, closer living quarters in large cities, and raised aggression levels due to the stress in our lives.

Simple enough then to solve the problem. All we have to do is move back the countries, get rid of our deodorants, pills, and hair sprays, and live happy, peaceful lives. Yeah right, I imagine that’ll happen about as soon as Rush Limbaugh throws a birthday party for Al Franken. And I’m not even suggesting we should try to do any of that. Why give up what we have worked so damn hard to achieve. We have dragged ourselves out from the waters, from the swamps, down form the trees, and in from the cities. Mankind has built the greatest artificial monuments ever seen on this planet. We have created the pyramids and raised the Hoover Dam. But in the process, we also have raped the land, poisoned the air, and killed many of the planet’s other inhabitants.

We are the greatest creation or either some Creator or some creative process, and we are also its greatest failure. Form the words of the Bible through those of Mark Twain, by way of paintings on French caves and from Picasso’s brush, we have forged an intellectual legacy never to be forgotten as long as there are men to read and to look. Through the genocides of Adolf Hitler and wholesale burnings of rainforests, however, we will also leave an inheritance of hatred and murder. Our time has come, and, with a combined effort form ourselves and Mother Nature, it too shall pass.

For the past four or five million years, we, as a species, have ruled the roost. We have been the most dominant animal in a vast web of life on this planet. We have made and massacred gods by the score, and have dared to challenge even Nature herself. But she will not be so easily brought low. Before us She watched the reign of lizards and of fish, both coming to ends by way of disasters to huge to be prepared for. Comets came and darkened the sky, freezing out those who were then masters. Volcanic eruptions covered the planet in lava, warming the very waters in which the rulers did swim. And yet life went on. The slate was beginning to get too crowded, so She came along and wiped it clean, only to see the new creatures write anew. For now we have covered the board until we live on top of one another in our cities, reaching and stretching for every available bit of space and air. It is our time to be washed away.

And we might just be the one doing the washing. We spent much of our time her in small skirmishes, armies marching and tanks rolling along as we killed each other by the thousands. But our numbers continued to grow. And then we found the ability to kill by the millions and then by the hundreds of millions. We tapped the power of the sun, and encased it in shells that we aimed at our own kind. We gave ourselves the ability to end it all, then we grew the anger to do it and, thankfully, the fear not to.

But for more than a generation now, we have pointed these unholy and evil weapons at each other and have bemoaned the fact that we are doing it. Others have fought to end this fatalistic posturing, and perhaps now they have it under control. But we have not been silent and lazy the whole time. We have designed ways to kill the fish and the fowl, the trees and those tramping along below them. In the air we have put chemicals that may slowly be boiling us alive. Into the waters we have dumped oils that poison our foods. Onto the grounds we have buried things that will glow for as long as we have been on this planet. And we have been stupid and blind the whole time.

But now we begin to realize that we will pay for our short-sightedness. And part of me hopes that we do. In mankind I believe the greatest of beauties has been realized. We have made wonderful things, have conquered the tyranny of genes to now let the sick and the lame lead healthy lives, and we have created as none other have ever done. I have to believe this because it s the only way that I can ever justify the rise of our kind. Yet I see the other side, the one that has killed others of our kind, has murdered those we never even got to know, has burned the trees, poisoned the world, and deserved to be cleansed. For these actions sometimes I wish for the destruction of us. Of an end for everything that we ever wrote, drew, or built. We must have wiped away so that someone else can begin anew.

But we must have no fear. Even if we so sicken our world that we can no longer live upon it, something else will be able to. Next, perhaps, will be the time of the rats, or of the cockroaches, or the insects, or the bugs. Out of the very ashes of our cities will rise afresh something that Nature sees every few millennia: the next big thing. She saw the dinosaurs rule for more than a hundred million years, and then they went. So far we have not spent one one-hundredth of that time on Earth as this big thing, and She won’t give a damn about us when we are gone.

So why should we even bother to keep the air clean or to stop killing anything that is less than we are? Roughly ninety-nine percent of the species that have ever existed on our world are now extinct, and we shall join that number some day. So should we not flaunt out moment of glory, grasp the short time that we have the throne, and live our lives as selfishly as we can?

Yes, by all means, we should, and yet I hope we do not. The world is still beautiful, the forests still thick and teaming with lives yet to be explored or lived, the sunsets still draw me to the sea. For these beauties, for your wives yet loved, and for our children unborn, we should protect that in which we find beauty. We must ensure that they will someday be faced with this same choice. Will we – and someday they – pluck flowers from the ground, pave over their fields, and build skyward, or will they cherish, preserve, and enjoy only to give the next generation a chance to choose again?

Only one of those choices allows us to choose again. The other takes the choice away from our children and ensures that Nature will take the choice away from us and us away from our world. Unless we take ourselves away before She has the chance…

I'm not so sure that my ideas found here are very much different from others that I've expressed before. Interesting how little the brain changes sometimes...