THE PROBLEM // HOPE

THE PROBLEM // HOPE

originally published on January 23, 2019 on now-defunct tedpackard.com

The Wall is not the problem.  

If we come together, create a consensus-based council to discuss and reform our immigration policies and enforcement practices, then they unanimously agree on a perfect way forward that satisfies everyone, and create a revolutionary method for interacting with the asylum-seekers and the migrant work force that actually grows our food, we will feel really good about ourselves.  And it won’t matter.

It’ll matter, in that real humans will have better lives because they aren’t trapped in a country where they are under threat of gang kidnappings, and where their government officials get assassinated regularly.  They’ll have a more stable life, and their employers in the US will have a more dependable worker base.  And they’re humans, not just workers - the culture they interact with and co-create will be rich and beautiful and all the things that come with being human.  

But it won’t matter.

Trump’s crimes are not the problem.  If evidence comes to light that is utterly undeniable, if a crime becomes clear enough that even his supporters are outraged, that conservative talk radio falls silent, if he is indicted, and somehow is not in office any more, if all the politicians and citizens come together and agree that the fever dream is over and what really happened anyways? …And do you want to get a beer or a coffee and try to have a civil conversation again?  

It won’t matter.

  The Climate Disaster is not the problem.  If all the countries of the world come together, decide that it is the highest priority to completely shift to 100% renewable resources, and they put it on the fast track that scientists agree is entirely necessary, and it happens and we’re all reading this on solar or wind powered devices and driving electric cars.  It won’t matter.

I hope it’s clear that I believe good things would come of those events.  Really good things.  Things that we could feel very good about.  But at the heart of each of them would remain the blueprint of the culture that is turning this earth into a place that is no longer a habitat for humans.  

This is a story (updated by me) that the dearly departed Daniel Quinn used to illustrate the situation:

There is a sinking ship.  All the passengers have assembled on the deck and are preparing to enter the life boat, when the Captain announces, “Women and children first!” 

A voice from the crowd replies, “We’ve moved beyond that systemic misogyny and ageism, and believe in equality, everyone should have an equal opportunity to enter the life boat!”

Another voice responds, “But my people have suffered greatly at the hands of your people, so we should be guaranteed a number of seats on the boat!”

Another voice interjects, “How do we know these the lifeboat won’t sink?” Another voice, “Frankly, I don’t even think this boat we’re on is sinking. I’ve been on it a long time, so why get in another boat?”

“Was the lifeboat made using sustainable materials?”

“I’ve heard there are stowaways on board.  Only passengers that bought a ticket should be allowed on the lifeboat!” “No guns should be allowed on the lifeboat!”

“I’m not getting on the lifeboat if we’re going to let two men get married on it!”

“He’s not my captain!  I’m not getting on his lifeboat!”

And so it was, that the ship sank, and no one ever got onto the lifeboat.

 

Hopefully this stings.  A little.  It certainly stings me.  If it doesn’t sting, just insert a belief of your own into the story.  There, now we’re all a little sore.

So, is the ship sinking?

There’s a peculiar consensus being peddled by popular culture in recent years:  “The world is going to end, remain calm, and do not alter your amount of purchasing.”  If you don’t think that’s the message, you’re not watching the movies or netflix or amazon or the news.  Zombie apocalypse, natural disasters, epidemics, aliens blowing up the world, reports of impending catastrophe, advertising, advertising, advertising.  The world keeps getting destroyed in our movies, and we’re told its coming to our real lives some day soon.

In the movies, at least, it isn’t entirely our fault.  In reality, there’s nowhere else to point the finger.  

The bizarre thing to me, as someone who came through high school in the late 90s, is the shift from this cultural mindset:  “The world is giant and resilient and things aren’t that bad and if you think civilization could ever collapse you’re actually insane and invalid.”

To this mindset:  “The world is definitely going to explode and we’ve missed the opportunity to actually change anything, so it’s your generation’s problem now, sorry!”

This is confusing and frustrating to me, as I was one of those teens telling everyone that would listen, “The boat is sinking!  We’ve got to just get on the lifeboat!!”

The problem was always the lifeboat.  People don’t like the lifeboat.

People don’t want to hear about the lifeboat, because to even open this conversation is to admit, by some measure, that the boat we’re on, the boat that we allparticipate in constantly co-creating, is not only sinking, but that it was made to sink.  It is so deeply personal feeling, but it’s not about you, it’s about culture.

Culture for us is the equivalent of water for a fish.  We can hardly see it, though we move through it and breathe it in every moment of our lives.  We were born into it, and we don’t know anything different.  It is not fossil fuels destroying our world.  It is not inequality and racism, it is not corruption, it is not any one of these symptoms.  It is the disease.  It is our culture.  

I mean our global culture - the one that, at various points, spread to every corner of the world over the last 10,000 years.  This culture, whatever language it spoke, whatever customs it brought with it, eliminated or assimilated thousands of indigenous cultures, bringing in their stead these two basic assumptions:

The world was made for humans.

Humans were made to rule the world.

I don’t personally believe that about myself.  You might not believe it.  But we act like we do.  Our culture believes it, and whispers and screams this idea from most every teacher, textbook, advertisement, and newspaper.  

If you go to any country in the world, you will find these two assumptions at work.  You’ll find it at the heart of the religions, but you’ll most importantly find it at the fingertips and in the sweat on the brow, devout and atheist alike, as they cut down old-growth forests, blow up mountains, empty the seas of fish, and make toxic trash that they put in the ground or in the water.  

None of the individuals doing these things have to like it, agree with it, or believe that they personally are the inherited ruler of all creation.  But, no culture could support these practices without a deeply held belief that this world was made for us to do whatever we please.  And our culture needs us to do these insane things.  If we suddenly started regarding all of life as an infinitely complex and mutually worthy and integrally important part of our own existence, well, would you buy a latte made from industrial agriculture and petroleum products?  Would you buy a new car, even an electric one made from metals and relying on an infrastructure that segregates and destroys biological communities?  Would you buy a new phone, pieced together from rare earth minerals mined under toxic conditions that spill out into the waters, assembled by humans working under slave-like conditions?

For our individual sanity and survival, most of us choose to ignore the actual origin and actual philosophical implications of our choices.  We are delightfully removed from the physical creation of modern conveniences and we are thoroughly disempowered to make a choice that feels meaningful.  You can buy organic or recycled, but it’s not going to stop the old growth trees from being cut down to make toilet paper.  

We’re addicted to caffeine, so we have to keep supporting industrial agriculture.  We can’t get a job without a phone, so we have to buy one.  We live so far away from the source of our actual food and the work that we must do to trade for credits to pay for the roof over our heads, that we have to buy the car.  

This is modern survival, and to do all these things, even with an intellectual understanding that they are harming the world we live in and rely on for our lives, is to participate in the culture, to perpetuate the destruction of our community of life.

And there’s so much trauma here.  Have you ever driven past your old neighborhood or childhood home to see the nearby forests replaced with new homes?  Have you ever gone to a favorite river and found its color altered by chemical waste?  Have you woken up one morning to hear that the frogs are not singing in the pond across the street anymore because of the pesticide-filled farm uphill?  We are deeply human in a way that is older than this culture we are trapped in, and we feel so deeply this pain of loss - or we have numbed ourselves to it out of emotional self-defense.

This is the culture that created colonialism and intercontinental slavery.  This is the culture that screams progress at all costs, never asking if that new product or new process is safe or worth it.  

This is the culture that creates pesticide-laden monoculture farming.  It’s the same culture that can literally transform an entire ecosystem into a single plant covered in poison that kills everything else and simultaneously hold the belief that humans couldn’t possibly change their environment.  

So.  The wall doesn’t matter.  Trump doesn’t matter.  Climate change doesn’t matter.  Social justice, Constitutional rights, all of it.  Whatever the hot-button issue is this week, this election cycle, this decade, it will never question or change the underlying assumption that fuels all these practices, that this world was made for us and we were made to rule it.  

I can hear the rebuttals:  But combatting climate change!  If that were truly attended to, wouldn’t that fix so many ecological issues?  Social justice works towards a quality of life rooted in human rights for all people at all levels of society - that’s a good thing!  Rooting out corruption in politics will make it possible for progressive programs to do their work, environmentally, socially, economically!

Of course it would, all of these are valid goals, and I am so grateful for the worthy efforts of those working towards social justice, putting their bodies in the way of bulldozers, canvasing for anti-corruption legislation, and a thousand other causes.  My worry is, and has always been, that if the ethos remains that underlies all those problems, that humans are the most important thing on earth, then we will still succeed in creating our own extinction, along with a great many other species.

Earth is a multiplicity of relationships.  She is a macro-organism unto herself, and every bacteria and every whale and every bird and every wolf and every moth has an infinitely important and infinitely unknowable part to play in life continuing.  

Diversity is what makes life possible, and practically every facet of our culture reduces it, whether it is diversity of species or diversity of thought.  

I want to feel good at the end of this writing.  I want to have articulated a way forward with hope and possibility.  I want to have written something true.  

The truth of my own is that I do not hold hope for our culture as it looks today.  I believe that, if there are people on earth in two hundred years, it will be because they are living in very different ways than we are today.  I also believe that there will be a lot less of them.  

I have a lot of grief in this.  There are always new reports about species lost, there are always updated predictions, bringing the date of some cataclysmic worldwide phenomenon closer to the present day.  In thirty years, it is now predicted that there will be full extinction of ocean fish.  That’s mind boggling, and that is a biological reset on a scale that humans have not yet weathered.

I have grief for the human beauty nestled in so many parts of our world, even surrounded by this culture that I deride.  I mourn our loss, the knowledge and wisdom of thousands of cultures already eradicated, and for our own.  

And for life, as I know it.  My own experience, yes, but also for the eagles and bears that live off the salmon, for the monarchs and the milkweed.  For the fungi and the forests.  

I know that life will go on, but I doubt that humans will get to be a part of it.  At least, not if they are living like we are today.

I believe that the ship is sinking.  And I do not know what the lifeboat looks like.  It hurts to say, having spent so much of my life telling people about it.  What I believe, is that I know what it does not look like, what that lifeboat cannot contain:  the ideas that the earth was made for us and we were made to rule it.

And that is a balm of some sort for me, the idea that, if there are humans here past this ecological event that we are creating, they will not be living as lords and rulers.  They will be living as participants, mutually dependent on the community of earth, giving and receiving life.  It might not look pretty by our standards here today, but it sounds worthy to me.  

I suppose that is some species of hope, bound up in the actions of those whom I respect and adore not only for their defiance of the dominant culture, but for their generative impact on the people and places that they care about, for their acknowledgment and interaction with the community of life.  I do see some people changing their relationships with each other, with the world around them, and it is beautiful, hard, and worth the effort.  

My invitation, for myself, for you, is to live a life that acknowledges, in a physical way, the relationships that sustain us.  However that looks for you, whatever physical action that is, do it, and invite others to do it with you.  That is how culture is grown.  

For me, it looks like listening.  That’s what we call it, anyways, when Annika and I go and sit under the giant sandstone cliffs in the backyard.  We are listening for what the land, what the animals, what the river and winds have to say.  What do they need?  What can I do that gives back to them for the incredible gifts that they give me?

It will look different for you, I am sure, and that gives me solace.  It need not be esoteric or lofty.  We need everyone’s energy in this, and there will be no, “one right way,” forward.  We need your way.  And we need your story of it.  Many of the old stories say that the world needs the humans to participate for things to keep working.  The old stories also say that when the world ends, it doesn’t really end, it comes back to life again.  

In this way, I feel that I can live through what is coming.  Perhaps, as we all tell our stories of connecting with this community of life, we will find ways that ease the changes, making spaces where we can live through and with them.  Perhaps.  

I don’t exactly have hope, but I can try to live a life that honors the old agreements of life, older than our culture, older than humans.  But hopeful? I’ll settle for Worthy.

Animas River Valley, Colorado

January 23, 2019