I don’t know about you but, I get up every morning expecting something different to happen. I’ve joked a bit about waking up in a different timeline and thinking that I started in a different reality. Seems that sense is not so common. Now, what is starting to make sense is human history. When I was a kid, I couldn’t understand how the Nazi’s were able to take over and do what they did. Now I know. Looking back at documented history, we can see thousands of years of people hurting other people for various reasons. I am sure that people back then felt it was the end of the world. For them it was the end of the world. Now thinking about it, what is the end of the world? Will the world die? Nope, just this pesky infection that keeps growing on it. Now, let me be clear. I am not saying that humanity itself is a “pesky infection” but what happens when something gets out of control? What happens when something is out of balance? It may have been good and then it becomes not so good.
We talk about climate change, pollution, destruction, all of these are damaging to us. The world will survive. The world will thrive, and the world will live on. Look at what we did in Chernobyl and the dogs, plant life and animals all adapted. We don’t change and we don’t adapt, we continue to do the same things we did over and again, remembering our mistakes and continuing to make them again regardless.
From what I can see, there is no blame on any one person because we allow it. We as a body and as a society allow it to happen. Sure, there are powerful people who may have an influence and power, but these people are given power by us. They just take it and use it. In the world of survival and the world of nature, who would be rich? The person with money, or the person with skills to survive?
Now, we are embracing technologies in a seemingly new way. Are we actually doing something new? I don’t think so. We surrender our power, our knowledge, our thinking to the machine in order to make things easier for ourselves. We become more distant from the natural world and more dependent on the machine world. How many of us can grow food in our own garden? How many of us know how to survive in the woods? How many of us know how to filter water? Many of us don’t have the basic skills. Many of us can’t even add and subtract any more.
We have also driven ourselves away from our families. We were in tribes; we were in pods, and we were together. We helped each other survive and we bonded through nature. Now we separate ourselves from each other and we come to fight over nothing. We can’t even allow ourselves to share the same ground because we have become more about ourselves. Nature doesn’t ask us to separate ourselves; it encourages us to live with other creatures and life in some symbiotic harmony. Kill the trees and harm the air, block the oxygen and kill the fish, kill the fish and kill the food supply. Kill the food supply and then what? Pull a thread on any tether of connection. The purportedly most intelligent of us want us to go to other planets. For what? We will do the same thing there.
Is it the end of the world? I don’t think it is but I do believe that if humanity continues to separate itself from the natural world, and allow people to lie to themselves and to each other about what is real and what is false, it may be coming close to the end of our existence in the world.
The world will live on without us and it will not blink, it will not cry, it will just continue to do what it is doing.