64 Ice is Nice

For those of you who read my blog, you know I tend to be a bit melancholy about the world. Many of you with strong religious backgrounds look forward with hope and peace and love and tolerance. I think you believe the world will someday progress into a perfect union of love and tolerance and believers will be living on a planet with a perfect society. I'm here to tell you that some billions of years from now, the sun will balloon into a red dwarf star and consume this little mudball. We are in the backwoods part of the galaxy. Our little world is an insignificant speck in the scheme of things and it exists only through an infinitely complex series of events that eventually lead to enough chemicals coming together and forming complex organisms to eventually evolve(debatable whether that's a good thing) into some homicidal, destructive, bipedal organisms that continually debate their own origin, questioning every aspect of both their physical world and their ability to be able to question themselves.

With that off my chest, I put to you a question: Have you ever noticed the patterns that exist in the life of the planet herself? I did not say mankind because there is a larger process at work here. It does manifest itself in humankind but it has been around far longer than some highly evolved primates have been scratching their rear-ends looking for bugs. What I am speaking of is a breath or pulse that seems to beat, almost like a heart, only it is on a global scale. After the birth-pangs of violent extremes, i.e.-planet cooling from a molten blob, developing rudimentary life, then more complex plants and animals and the seasons themselves(due to our orbit around our pathetic yellow star and her own revolutions). The planet herself seems almost alive.

There is an ebb-and-flow to this planet. During the age of dinosaurs our mudball was a hot, lush place for the most part. The air was nothing like it is now, the continents were different and of course, the flora and fauna. The planet has continued cooling and voila! we get ice ages and periods of higher-than-average temperatures. I dont like all this "global-warming" mumbo-jumbo. It has been observed by scientists that the planet has had periods of high heat and the big-ol' glacier-covered snowcone effect. I think we are experiencing a minor warm-up now. We are overdue for the big-freeze. Politicians and pundits screaming about carbon credits and how carbon dioxide is a pollutant have persuaded the mush-headed masses that man alone has caused the potential downfall of our planet by heating the atmosphere and melting the glaciers, drowning polar bears and raping whales. I say the sheeple tend to panic when they experience the least little change in their perceived norm.

I say screw the polar bears, the spotted owls, the forest jaguar and any other species that stands in the way of man's survival. I am all for helping a species get a leg up if they're having trouble reproducing, but if a million people will have to go without heat because a purple striped frog with 3 toes had his habitat encroached upon, well, let's say that frog legs are pretty good if they're cooked right. The trouble with humans is natural selection. We have pretty much figured out how to avoid nature's culling mechanism. More people are surviving horrific injuries, disease and birth defects than at any time in history. Our average life span is double what it was since we invented recorded history and quite frankly, the elderly are surviving(in many cases) way past their viable, enjoyable life span. We prolong many lives for the benefit of doctors, hospitals, nursing homes and da..da...da......drug companies. They poke, tweak and prod, medicate and near-eviscerate them like some sick biology experiment to milk every last dollar from insurance, government programs and family until the well is dry. This is about quality of life, folks. Plain and simple. Every single one of you has had a relative that has either been kept alive without a semblance of their former self, been kept alive in misery or know someone that has.

We are a small, almost infinitismal creature in the scope of things. This planet was only meant to support so much life and we insist on forcing it to our will. Massive algae blooms(look at the Gulf of Mexico) directly or indirectly from farming that drains massive amounts of fertilizers and pesticides into our waterways, Irrigation that drains natural aquifers, these and more are what's contributing to destroying the earth. The reasonably viable living space that is available here is being forced to support more people than it reasonably can. These areas become choked and poisoned and still we pile more on. I think this planet is a living organism. Eventually, she will get to a point that, just like our body, she will fight the offending virus with anything available. As if war, pestilence and disease weren't bad enough, the earth may come up with some new horror that will scratch the itch until it goes away.

I've said it a hundred times: use what we have and what we invent and live in harmony and achieve a balance with nature. Will we? I doubt it. We seem to have to learn the hard way with just about everything. We cant even find a way to acheive renewable energy without taking money from the poor, giant companies. If only we didnt have to take billions from their coffers to be able to let even the poorest among us have cheap heat and transportation. Sigh.

Maybe the world does need thinned out. Nature culls the weakest of the herd, the least viable plants, the slowest, the stunted, the diseased, maybe we should too. It's not as bad a problem in developed nations as it is in 3'd world countries. You've seen them on tv. Living in squalor, uneducated, unemployed and living from day to day in a hell and misery that we have never known. Their countries have not focused on development and education. They frequently have regimes that exist only to bleed money and power from whatever segment of the population they can, so the people multiply and suffer.

The balance will come whether by our own hand our the earth's. The only other factor that could undo us is man's penchant for war. Iran, North Korea, Russia...so many others that want us to fall, fail, die trying. If nations like us fall the rest of the world will soon become a pile of grinning skulls with a few dictators and warlords sitting atop the piles. The visions of madmen dont include a plan for anything past destroying that which they abhor. They would milk the world dry for nothing more than a pile of money, some possessions and some people to order around and some to torture.

My guiding force pushes me to do the right thing every day. The problem with that is that I have no real influence or power to effect a change. Maybe someday my words will provoke the right person, maybe not. I can think that I am Captain America all I want, it wont change it. I wear our flag wrapped around my heart, a shield strapped to my wrist and all the righteous might I can muster, and yet, for all my squawking and strutting, I cannot change that which I think must be. I would rally like minds to my cause and be smashed down for my efforts. Today, this rant ends and I am a beaten man. Oh yeah, screw the ozone, I need a tan.