Welcome to By-Product Nation, where cancer, sickness and death have become acceptable by-products of our Industrial/Information Age. Join this nation of willfully blind consumers who refuse to make the connection between their lifestyle, their sickness and their mental stress.
Follow the lemmings as they consume plates of death and drink glasses of liquid suicide, refusing to accept the existence of either. We are so deep in denial, that the ancient mummies have more sense than we do.
The lessons of the past are not lost to us, but denied by us. For all of the evidence of dead civilizations bringing about their own destruction, we continue on a mad path of over consumption, species annihilation and habitat destruction. And, in the process, continue to deny our role in it all.
A child lies buried in his mother’s arms for eternity, buried in a once jungle, now ancient desert. The lessons are right there for us to see, global warming fan, foe, or other.
Geological time is long, so long that humans can’t comprehend the depth and breath of moving earth, dying volcanoes and infant seas aborning. For ours is a mayfly existence, brief in the eyes of the ancient living things of this world.
And so, it is sometimes ironic, our preoccupation with global warming, out of control meteors and flickering solar flares. The things that cause catastrophes or species killers are more long lived than we can imagine—even as we speed up our own species’ destruction by playing with matches in a world tinderbox.
Natural disasters and geological processes, we think, give us an excuse to put our heads beneath the covers and pretend we don’t see the storm clouds coming. If things are working on a geological scale, why, we ask, should we even be concerned?
After all, we have nothing to do with the birth of a mountain or the death of a river. We are mere humans, mayflies on two legs. We have no ability to move the earth, change the dance of the earth around the sun, or stop a river from destroying a mountain.
We’ll just cop out and pretend we have no responsibility for our actions, nothing to do with pollution, climate change, or desertification. No, not us. Some other guy did it. Unfortunately, that some other guy, or gal looks back at us in the mirror every day.
He’s looking at us while we snarf down hundreds of bottles of bottled water and pack the landfills with the “dead soldiers” when we are done drinking. Our “battery not included” battery-addicted culture sends millions of pounds of toxic waste to our landfills every year, poisoning the groundwater, and the fish and ourselves if we are poor enough to have to eat fresh caught fish.
But, no. We aren’t responsible for any of this. That alien invasion of grays that put implants in our brains and control us remotely did it. If it weren’t for their controlling our minds, we wouldn’t be driving gas-guzzlers, pouring industrial waste into rivers, lakes and oceans, or consuming coal fired electricity, with its side effect of pollution, acid rain, deforestation and water pollution.
Blame it all on the liberalz. Global warming is a hoax. Desertification is a liberal fantasy and pollution is some tree hugger’s waking dream. It’s all fault of those pesky mind-controlling aliens who make us do self-destructive things so that when we destroy ourselves, they’ll take over the planet more easily.
Oh, where in the world is my tin foil hat. They’re trying to take over my mind, again. Repeat after me: ain’t no such thing as global warming, pollution, peak oil or Santa Claus. It’s all a figment of your imagination.
And so it will be that, thousands of years from now, when they uncover what is left of our post-atomic, glow in the dark, genetically manipulated, chemical addicted, consumer mad “culture”, our bones and garbage will be so toxic that we’ll still be bringing death to the yet unborn. The nuclear garbage we’re now burying will still be capable of killing long after we’ve managed to destroy ourselves and mismanage the environment.
Unless we wise up and reclaim our world from the bringers of death and destruction, our species’ time in this place will be foreshortened by our own stupidity. For all of the conflict in the scientific community over global warming, human ecosystem destruction and species destruction, the writing on the wall is old—as the ghost of thousands of long dead civilizations can tell you.
Welcome to the Land of the Undead. A place, where madmen play with dangerous toys, and create deadly chemicals and industrial processes, giving the gift of multi-generational death to those who have yet to be born.
Welcome to cancer as a by product of Consumer Culture, where more than a quarter of our “civilization” will at sometime in our lives develop some type of out of control tumor growth—cancer, from the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat. Read the bones of the long-dead and ask yourself: dare you think you are superior?
The major by-product of our so-called civilization is fast-becoming cancer, species extinction, diabetes and early death. For the first time in our history, Americans are reportedly living shorter lives than our ancestors.
And, this is “progress”?
