The crushing tide
Our lives impact the lives of all living people, but not just us. How we live — sustainably versus unsustainably — affects the living biosphere.
We have become a monolithic human tide that controls the land, the sky, our waters, and even our oceans, by how we choose to live.
This means how much you take — or give back — matters morally to the others who are trying to survive, including other life forms on Earth.
Black and white issues
Think of the old American South. An industry arose dependent upon addiction. It was addiction to cheap cotton, tobacco, sugar, and a few other things that fueled the “need” for some humans to own other human beings. Mass industrialization fueled the whole machinery. This gave us huge cities, child labor, pollution, crowded slums, and everything that comes to mind when we think of Dickens, Colonial imperialism, or the American Civil War.
This resulted in a world where a relatively few were wealthy, and in control, of most everybody else.
Some reforms evolved, not by charity of the wealthy, but by demands from the oppressed. The marginalized, and their allies, the moral, fought to right the immorality of slavery, misogyny, and more.
It is the same tale of two pities, today. Except that now, no living organism on Earth is immune from harms, from zoonotic diseases, to plastic in oceans, to a potential nuclear war over oil and oligarchs.
You can be empowered by activism
Without question, and whether you believe it is happening or not, climate disruption and its attending consequences, war, famine, extinction, civil unrest, refugees, and catastrophe is the moral issue of our lives.
Truth telling helps. Believe those who will tell you the truth even if it is inconvenient. Believe, as always that you can trust your own senses and experience. If it smells polluted, or feels wrong, it probably is wrong. Think of how we hide our worst sins away from the world, such as factory farming, or pretending gas guzzlers, fast food, or fast fashion is acceptable, or sustainable.
Don’t believe anyone who tells you some are entitled. Profiteers have motive to say that some have earned what they have more than others. Some just want to contain the chaos, and protect law and order, they may say. Or, Some have provided the jobs and boosted the economy with this new form of slavery and addiction.
There are fragments of truth in all of the above claims about “our way of life.”
The fact is however, that we have never had eight billion people before. We have never had a humanity that impacts planetary systems through the Anthropocene this powerfully.
Yet, we are not helpless. The biggest change for your mental, physical, and spiritual health is to take empowerment in your own hands, and take action.
If you believe that only governments can’t act, then demand more of your government: we the people. If you believe only corporations can act, demand more accountability of them.
Only you can choose whether you plant a tree, or lead the next great protest.
Believe those who ask some sacrifice of you, because to pretend we don’t have to change our way of life ensures most of us have no life.
Two sides to every story?
Finally, the jury is still out on what is binary, what is not.
Is there more than one sex? More than one race? More than one kind of human suffering?
This I know: there are only two sides of history. We can only be moral by choosing the correct side of history.
There is also something we can be certain there is just one of, at least for now. There is only one Earth.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Sasha Freemind on Unsplash
