Keyboard cowboy drink coozie
It feels like all humankind is in a headlong rush to meet it, laughing behind the wheel like this is some sort of cosmic game of chicken. Things will not be okay, no matter how hard we cross our fingers. What we see around us today are the “signs and wonders” that the incomprehensible it finally here. What do we expect? Do we believe that a benevolent god will excuse our childish squandering of our gift and save us from killing ourselves just because we pray? Do we have sugarplum fantasies of a new Earthly Garden lovingly presenting herself to us after we turned this one into a landfill? But we ignore the warnings, and we exile the prophets as we turn our attention back to Fat City. William Butler Yeats skins the same cat in the opening of “Second Coming’ when he writes, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ the falcon cannot hear the falconer/ things fall apart/ the center cannot hold/ mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” One claims, “It started when we quit hearin’ ‘Sir’ and ‘Ma’am’”. My favorite scene in Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country For Old Men” has two crusty rural Texas sheriffs bemoaning the drug violence along the border and the breakdown in order. Its like the deities know more about us than we give them credit for. It is written.Īlongside the universal scriptural exhortations to humility, morality and good stewardship of the Earth are the universal scriptural warnings that it will all come crashing down in time. We sanctify greed as a virtue, and call it the Will of God, out of our own yearning to have that much ourselves.īut read the scriptures – whether the Bible, the Koran, the Upanishads or whichever holy book blows your skirt up – and you’ll find that our little experience as carbon-based units here on Earth has a “use by” date. Even if our own children are hungry, we praise the bounty of others who have overflowing granaries and treasuries. So we covet and hoard and consume what is in front of us, just so nobody else can get it.Īnd to justify our self-destructive behavior, we put words in God’s mouth. There are too many of us, and not enough of everything to go around. We have trapped ourselves between the laws of exponential growth and diminishing returns. Like lab rats left to reproduce unchecked in a cage of finite resources, we are breeding ourselves away from the dinner table and toward a messy end. Nothing seems to work anymore and we’ve become scared children with nuclear weapons. Because we mistrust our own wisdom, we rely on our emotions and superstitions. Without useful tools, we resort to politics. Suspicious and fearful toward each other and nervous about food, water and electrons, we fill our tanks and wonder how much will be left for tomorrow.
It manifests itself in the way the world behaves today. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we all feel it. The hair on the back of humanity’s neck raises because we can all feel it. You feel it as that icy chill along your spine when you balance your checkbook. You feel it when you whistle past the graveyard and something whistles back. I can’t see it yet, or shoot it, but its there. Something is fixin’ to happen and it ain’t good.
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