2122 Earth Day Question

Earth Day 2022 Answer

“Well,” we might answer, “lots of things. Important things; really important things. Too many worries to number. Like Ukraine. Like bullies in Russia and America and Uvalde. Like weapons of war that slaughtered children learning their ABC’s and the teachers who were teaching them.  Like the resurgence of nationalism that drove us deeper into caves we assumed to be secure. Like the assaults on truth, the sudden appearance of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news.’ Like our unwillingness to discuss what is real. 

“Most everywhere we turned, things were not good. Here at home, violence paraded through the streets of crowded neighborhoods. Guns and automatic weapons were killing civilians in shopping malls, schools, synagogues, mosques, churches, roadsides, and public squares. Misinformation and disinformation eroded public trust in the institutions essential to a democratic republic. A major television network promoted the former president’s certainty that the American election was stolen. Members of Congress advocated conspiracy theories that blaming our troubles on Satan operating in the Deep State. In Florida Mickey and Minnie, Donald Duck, and Goofy and Democrats were scorned as cannibals, sex traffickers, and pedophiles because they continued to say the word ‘gay’.

How could you be so foolish?

“All of that was important,” the 2122 Earth Day survivor might say. “But even the most worthy of those concerns was penultimate. They distracted your attention from the over-arching threat to everyone and everything, everywhere on the good Green Earth. Every day was Earth Day,  You ignored it.

“You were not the first generation with a chronic inability to focus, but you are the last. There were no safe rooms in the one House. No nation, no race, no clan, no caste, creed, ideology, gender, politics, tradition survives when its inhabitants become arsonists who burn their own House to the ground. The temperature was rising, the sea levels were rising, the oceans heating, the manatees dying for lack of clean water, the skies over Ukraine were black and filled with smoke and toxins. How could you have been so stupid?”

What was wise did not suit our tastes

“We had little taste for reality. We mistook a smorgasbord of tastes for reality itself. We took the table for granted. Everything was reduced to personal preference. Freedom without guardrails was the god we served. Few of us had the good sense to step back from the feast to wonder, ponder, gasp, or ask what was real and what was not. What is truth? Is anything really real?  Everything became subjective. Everything was a matter of opinion. Truth? Whose truth? Reality? According to whom?

“When the legs of the smorgasbord table began to crack, we continued to stuff ourselves. When the table legs began to creek, few of us noticed. Everything else might break, but not the smorgasbord table. Climate change? The end of Nature as we had known it? The Corona pandemic? Everything became fake news. We thought the table could not break.” 

Masters of Illusion

The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply the illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.

— Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) French author and polymath, quoted by L.K. Hanson in “You Don’t Say” in April 18, 2022 Star Tribune.

“When it came to things that mattered most, we had become the seducers and the seduced who en masse mistook personal freedom for Ultimate Reality. The Smorgasbord Table would never end.”

Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, June 12, 2022.