So, these days I lead a double life, and I don't like it. Most of the time here at home I am outside, or sit on my outside porch, or walk around, breathing the scent of plants and animals, talking to this or that plant that I admire for growing so well in a place where I know there is not much soil. Then I live totally in the here and now, as they used to say in the sixties. In that life I cannot lie, I cannot be nice, or angry, or even sad or happy. I just am.
But there are also times when I have to drive to the village to buy food, to mail something at the post office. Nice enough village, nice people, most of them know me by name, a friendly superficial knowing. But nothing compared to how I know the one white rooster that lives here: we truly know each other. He knows I deplore his sneaky aggressiveness, and so he tries to trick me. I try to trick him. Sometimes he wins, sometimes I do. That's as it is.
I was going to propose something. Now I cannot think what I can propose that would merge my two lives together. And I know from deep in my heart and soul, that unless we - the big WE: all of us, humans, - WE can only survive as a species if we can somehow, some way, find that primitive soul in us that craves to be one with all there is. Not better, not worse, not even very different at all from all there is. Somehow, we must learn to handle, deal with, that awkward ability we have to imagine. We think ourselves creators, but blind ourselves with how special we are, how different, how superior. Better than -- white better than colored, men better than women, young better than old, rich better than poor. Come on, people, we cannot be better than in a world where everything is connected to everything else, a planetary ecology. We imagine ourselves better, but look where that has gotten us...
In my aboriginal life I know I am in a neighborhood. There are not only plants, trees, animals, lots of lava, rocks, but also people around me. I can certainly include the ocean that is not far from here, and all around this island in my awareness of what is. But a government? Where did that imagination come from? A country? Who draws those lines? And then it gets out of hand. Industries that make things that nobody ever heard of before, but then we are told that this is going to help us live better, or cheaper, or easier. And next year we cannot do without. Or we are told that we have to have a phone pasted to our ear 14 hours a day so that we can... What exactly do we talk about?
For quite a few years we were told we absolutely needed a pickup, well, a truck really. And we could have four doors and five passengers, and still have a truck bed pasted onto the back. Or we absolutely had to transport seven people, and they had to be entertained with DVD players for each of the two rows of seats behind the driver. And we needed an air-conditioned house with a minimum of four bedrooms and four bathrooms, or maybe five bathrooms, one outside. And the same people sold us on the idea that when you buy an acre of land that land is yours to do with as you damn well please. They (the "developer") cut all the trees and shrubs that finally, after a few hundred years, found some cracks in the lava. Then they let the bulldozer "rip" the lava into big blocks, drive over and back until the big rocks are smaller rocks, more or less flat. Then a few large truckloads of crushed rock are spread to make it like a flat floor. Then you build a house, always facing the road, regardless of where the sun might be at noon when it is hot. The house, of course, obeys the building codes from the state of New Hampshire, although this is Hawai'i, and this island is officially in the Tropics. The real estate agent who sells you the property says "Now you decide where you want a tree!" And you are nice and smile, forgetting that it takes any tree more than ten years to become a tree, even here. For a few years that flat acre of crushed rock will not even grow grass.
None of that can be in my world. I have learned that clear cutting so much land changes the weather here. We used to get much more rain than we do now. The weather people explained to me that a green forest attracts rain, flat bright surfaces send rain clouds up and away. We used to think ourselves lucky to be on the rainy side of this island, now we have a more-or-less drought. Other Hawaiian islands suffer a D3 drought (something like a Hurricane 3).
That is what civilization has done to our planet, the only home we have.
robert wolff © september 2008
Note: The words "A Modest Proposal" appeared in my head as I was thinking of a title for this little essay. I know there was another "modest proposal," although right now I cannot think what it was, who wrote it, when. But I remember that it was right on, and not at all modest. That is exactly what I wanted to say. Unless we are able to leave all this wasteful living behind, there is no future for Homo sapiens (wise man).
Perhaps we should think of ourselves as homo fallo: deceiving man. Today we may think deceiving is fine, business, advertising, promises of an ever better life. MORE, always more.
But we are deceiving ourselves, and that is not only not wise, it is stupid.
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