earth – Thoughts at Large

A sentence in The Silence of the Lambs has always stuck with me. Playing a cat and mouse game with young Clarice Starling, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, in his burgeoning respect for the young FBI agent, slips in a clue to the identity of “Buffalo Bill” by saying, “We begin by coveting what we see every day.”

In other words, what we know, what we’ve experienced, is our “normal.” Every child knows only one childhood, and while the grass is always greener at your friend’s house (because you don’t see their life behind closed doors), we only know our life as “normal.” We are all “middle class” in that respect. In the simplistic world of childhood, we understood that there were kids who had it better than we did and kids who had it worse. We, regardless of who we were, were in the middle. Normal.

In genuine Monty Python “Four Yorkshiremen” tradition, I now look at children today and lament the ease with which they can communicate (email/cell phones), their easy access to information (the internet), the societal shifts in the Overton window concerning LGBTQ+, race relations, and other socioeconomic changes they now see as “normal.” However, I also cringe that my generation didn’t fix enough of the outstanding issues plaguing the America of my youth (and compounded the incomplete list by adding so many more complicated problems). If the goal of every generation is to leave the world better than we found it, we have failed. We are leaving behind a world that may not be inhabitable because of climate change. “Here, kids! Apply this SPF 1,000,000 suntan lotion before going outside, and don’t forget your space suit when walking to the bus stop.”

And it goes far beyond climate change, as catastrophic as that is. Children today see cheating (from Trump on down) as the way to get ahead. And that’s because there are no consequences for bad behavior—quite the contrary. We reward bad behavior with advancement and success (unless you lose to someone less moral than you). Drive 100 mph? No problem. Police are only on tv and in movies. Cheat on your wife? No problem. It must have been her fault. Lie at work? No problem. Blame someone else. There are no negative consequences for bad behavior, only the promise of advancement over those suckers following the rules. And that’s the flipside. Those who are moral and adhere to societal rules are “sheep” destined to be led to slaughter by those not afraid to wield the knife. So, not only are there no negative consequences for bad behavior, but there are negative consequences for good behavior. Think about that.

And don’t come at me with, “It’s because of the lack of God in the classroom.” Evangelicals are the most hypocritical flock around. Already willing to accept the bible, angels, and demons as real (while ignoring Trump’s egregious mendacities, viciousness, and megalomaniacal march toward dictatorship), their unfailing support for him is genuinely disgusting and devoid of logic. Fiction is real and facts irrelevant—Trump’s army of pretzel-twisted moralists.

The “Lost Generation” was so named because so many born between 1883 and 1900 had their youth and young adulthood stolen by World War I and death, and survivors were disenfranchised wanderers condemned to see their children fight and die in World War II.

Our failure to address the problems we inherited, coupled with our selfishness and abdication of responsibility, have created a new Lost Generation. This is a generation born into the normalcy of school shootings, movie theater shootings, grocery store shootings, church shootings, concert shootings, club shootings, (insert setting here) shootings, open carry, concealed carry, constitutional carry, and societal harikari, racism, hatred, whataboutism, science is bad, education is worse, bullshit.

This Lost Generation will raise future generations further devoid of responsibility, racing toward an uninhabitable planet with no backup available and mass shootings so commonplace journalists will no longer cover them. “Thoughts and prayers” will be reserved for events not “baked into” American freedom and exceptionalism. There will be ever more rule-breaking, selfish predators advancing through the devoured crowd of ethical chumps still inhabiting the remnants of civilized society—shame on us. We, Generation X (1965-1980), failed in our mandate to leave the world better than we found it. And we learned it from the generation before us, the Baby Boomers (1946-1964), who taught us excess, greed, and self-centeredness as a winning formula. It was our “normal,” it was what we coveted. So, too, the generations after us, the Millennials (1981-1996) and Generation Z (1997-2012).

“We begin by coveting what we see every day.” It is our normal. And we are raising a new lost generation on a dying planet. We covet that which we know. And all we know is wrong.

In light of the terrible attacks in Paris, Beirut, Syria, Iraq, and the 88 who are killed with a gun in America every day, I am reminded of the quote from Carl Sagan regarding our pale, blue dot:

“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 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. 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.

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. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

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.”

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