Tags
American politics, Living Planet Index 2014, Losing our way, Mother Earth, nature, Scourge of the Earth, Sixth Mass Extinction, The One Percent, US Midterm Elections
Homeless in the USA
Photo Credit: Ed Yourdon / Paltalk News Network
November 4 is Midterm Elections in the United States. Americans will be choosing their representatives for the United States Congress, state governors, and their state legislatures. A number of citizen initiatives also have their place on the ballots.
While we’re busy pursuing our individual goals and dreams or simply struggling to survive, the rich and powerful One Percent are buying our government representatives and, through them, changing the laws in their favor.
America is no longer the nation that our Founding Fathers had envisaged. We have lost our way.
Not only do we resort to violence to settle our differences, we have also become insensitive to and uncaring towards the needs and sufferings of the less fortunate among us. It’s now a crime to be poor and homeless.
We turn our backs on children fleeing violence in their home countries. We imprison our black and brown youth for the slightest infraction of the law. We deny our working class a living wage. We suffocate our youth with student debt.
We send our young men and women to die in distant, unending wars. When our warriors return home with broken minds and bodies, we burden their families with the task of mending their lives.
Believing that we only have worth with the stuff we accumulate, we have become mere consumers. The role models of our children are celebrities of our own making.
Mindless of the unpredictable consequences, we manipulate Nature like gods. With our bloated world population, we scour the Earth for more and more, leaving death and destruction in our wake. Spurning the smallest and grandest of other living species, we fool ourselves that we are above the natural world.
Mother Earth is now undergoing its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals. Our planet has not experienced such a degree of loss since a natural disaster exterminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Humankind has become the scourge of the Earth, threatening the lives of 99 percent of other species.
In their Living Planet Index 2014, released in September, WWF Global alerted that our planet’s biodiversity is reaching critical levels. Since 1970, the number of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish worldwide has fallen by an average of 52 percent. Freshwater species alone show an average decline of 76 percent. With the greatest decline by region, Latin America has suffered an 83 percent loss.
The One Percent has taken control of our government and our global institutions. We can choose to follow them on the path to human extinction or choose to take a different course.
When we vote on November 4, let us choose individuals who will put the interests of we-the-people and Mother Earth before those of the One Percent.
Vote wisely.
Three Worlds One Vision 
Your reference to the current mass extinction, is, I think, very helpful. I would add to what you have said so well, that the 1% do not do all this damage alone. They require the indifference or collaboration of a misguided majority of the country. As I just quoted Shakespeare’s “King Lear” in a post of my own, you will recognize this: “‘Tis the time’s plague when mad men lead the blind.”
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I agree with you, Dr. Stein. We are accomplices in the maladies that afflict us.
When I read your recent post, “Getting a grip in a difficult time: Reasons for optimism,” I thought your quote from Shakespeare’s “King Lear” remains applicable to our times. Even back in those days (the 1600s), humankind was capable of discerning our folly in giving power to “mad men.”
How little we have evolved since then!
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It is difficult to have hope and yet we must go on. This post was a terrible summary of our own evils and misdeeds to ourselves and our world. Since I write this after the election, my heart sinks further “and yet we must go on”. There is good in our species, there are wonders we have created, but we tend to believe more in our power than generosity and we lust for goods more than desire the good for the many. There isn’t much time left.
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Sadly, our planet lost on November 4. But, as you say, “yet we must go go.”
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