I am amazed that I have to actually say this but the transition requires us to make a decision away from the consumer paradigm. WE don’t have to leave all the creature comforts and luxuries behind – let me dispel that ridiculous notion straight away – but we have to think and do things differently. The elite hierarchy are in love with their power and control, and you are the ones they want control and power over! As I was pondering what to say about explaining the passive acceptance of waiting for the elites to give us what we want in a new world of our choosing, I thought about a passage Carl Sagan once wrote.
“A Pale Blue Dot – This excerpt from Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan’s suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays, Earth appears as a tiny [single] point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.” https://imgur.com/gallery/HTxsw
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark…The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
There is the crux of it all – this is our home! Yet, we are passively allowing the consumer paradigm, which is the design of the controlling elites, to use us to strip-mine the planet into a waste heap unsuitable for life as we would like it to be just so they can have money to control us. I keep reading publications by right-wing think Tanks about why Consumer Capitalism is the only way to live, yet this is all predicated on the notion of scarcity and the need to limit access to resources in a profit only (read greed) based economic system. I have said this often, we do not have any scarcity of resources. What we have is an over production and distribution problem. Think about how modern manufacturing and advertising in the developed world (and now including the developing world) is built on the notion of ‘built-in-obsolescence.’ Are you looking forward to I-Phone 15? OK, it’s not here yet, but I’m sure the marketing people are salivating at the idea of what technology they can get people to buy next that they didn’t know they needed.
As Carl Sagan emphasized, Earth is our home and the only one we have. It’s possible, if we do not destroy ourselves first, that one day we could venture across the vast tracts of space to find new planets (unless of course there are other space beings already there) but for now this is it. We are literally trashing the planet to make money. And then what? Think about it for even just a minute. Imagine doing this to the place you call home every night. There’s a saying, “Even a dog does not shit where it sleeps” yet metaphorically, we do, and we rationalize it as OK because we have ‘Stuff.’ There are a couple of well used acronyms; OOSOOM (Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind) and NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) that describe human complacency to all the pollution and trash we generate in living a consumer lifestyle. As long as we do not have to put up directly with the consequences we seem happy to tolerate them – i.e. they are someone else’s problems.
When we were just isolated populations on continents vast distances apart, that attitude might have seemed OK, but we are now a global population where things occurring on one continent affect everyone else across the whole planet. It is now impossible to find a pristine environment anywhere on the planet. The air currents, hydrolytic cycle, and the oceans have carried pollution and trash to every spot on Earth (and that includes Antarctica and the Arctic). People worldwide who do not yet have ‘Stuff’ or the consumer lifestyle suffer the consequences just as we do. There is no place to hide or get away from consumerism anymore. Our future and the coming adaptive evolution of the planet is in our hands NOW. Will we adapt or will we foolishly keep out heads low in an attempt to ignore what is happening all around us? Don’t look to our political leaders or the global elites for salvation. If humanity is to prosper in a changing world, WE have to begin the process of change and create the transformation we want to see happen. WE are that ‘pale blue dot’ hanging in the dark vastness that is our galaxy. On that small blue dot we are one family of humanity, still with myriad cultures and languages, melding with the rest of life that is Gaia our earth mother. Will we continue to choose a dark path of Greed, Hate, and Fear, or can we choose a path of light with Generosity, Love, and Connection. This is not a decision for some future time, but for US NOW. We choose now or the choice will be made for us.
TBC…..
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