It’s a Trillion-Alarm Fire, Not a Boy-Scout Litter Campaign

A Trillion-Alarm Fire—You Don’t Stop at the Grocery on Your Way Home!

I compare what is happening right now to cause planetary death in the relatively near future to a trillion-alarm fire with everyone looking the other way. I say you need to respond to this with the urgency of being in a world war, marshaling all available national and world resources to bear on it, and not with the complacency of a boy-scout litter pick up campaign. When you get a call at work that your house is on fire, you rush home worrying about whether your family is alive or dead, what, if anything, remains of your precious keepsakes, and so on. And you don’t, this time, stop on the way home to have a short visit with your mother at the nursing home, grab a few things at the grocery store, or even fill up your tank at the gas station! YOU GO STRAIGHT HOME AND TRY TO SAVE YOUR FAMILY AND HOME! What follows, from May of 2010, is an example of the attitude of dealing with global apocalyptic events as if, like in this case, they are of similar importance to a plane going down. My point, of course, is that we should be dealing with them will all the urgency of a “trillion-alarm fire” happening. For each of these are disasters contributing to an ongoing catastrophic ecocidal process, the tip of which, only, we see in the Fukushima reactor blowups and the Gulf Oil Spill:

Matthews: “four-alarm fire” in Gulf! Landrieu smirks. Matthews: There are ways to suck up oil…it is a US emergency not just a BP business problem

May 25, 2010. Today, Chris Matthews likened the Gulf Oil Spill to a four-alarm fire. While Senator Mary Landrieu smirked, Matthews said, “I don’t know what the legality of this is, but the President of the United States has got this challenge, not just BP. BP has got a business challenge; we have a national challenge. North America that we inherited and would like to pass on to our future generations is in big trouble.” Earlier, in answer to a question by Matthews as to whether there’s “anybody in the world that can come and collect petroleum…that’s out there in the Gulf right now…anybody that can collect it?” Landrieu responded saying, “Well, first of all, Chris, just let me say this: If Delta Airlines…plane goes down, I don’t think we necessarily call all the airlines to come in and help in this very specific way. Now, I will tell you, that all the oil companies have been helping since day one, informally….”

Are you as concerned as I am hearing that kind of cavalier attitude about human life?

Oil Spills and Reactor Blowups

“Where is the fierce urgency of Now?!!!”

I can’t believe the nonchalance around the huge environmental catastrophes that have gone on in just the last year alone—specifically, the Gulf Oil Spill and the Fukushima Japan nuclear disaster. When the BP disaster was ongoing and gushing devastating amounts of oil into the Gulf, Donna Brazille, frustrated with the Obama Administration’s response to the Spill, fumed aloud, “Where is the fierce urgency of Now?!!! But these hugely unprecedented environmental catastrophes, daily spreading the damage to our planet, are just two canaries in a coal mine. We are just beginning to understand the immensity of the damage to our planet the Fukushima disaster did. We will probably not be told the degree of radiation exposure from it we are receiving until long after people have been dying in droves from it.

The BP oil spill of 2010 is, similarly, presenting ongoing planetary damage, which, like the Japan nuclear disaster, is, as I speak, not being reported. At this moment, in fact, dolphin and whale carcasses in the hundreds are washing up on Gulf beaches, birds are dying and some are simply dropping dead out of the sky, and we know for sure of at least one dead zone caused by the BP oil spill—a dead zone being an area in the ocean where nothing can live for lack of oxygen—which is a hundred miles long and twelve miles wide. I have heard reports of other dead zones cropping up in the Gulf, and it has been said they are growing in size with time. Beyond these we have to wonder how many more there are, yet unknown, and how great is the ongoing damage.

But none of these dire events are being mentioned much in the media. We hear the reports, but then the media directs our attention to something else. When Fukushima was being actively monitored by the media not long ago, I heard reported on CNN some very apocalyptic developments occurring there. Immediately afterward, CNN directed our attention to some in-depth reporting on a snake that had gotten loose in New York City. Now that snake made me sooo scared, I don’t know why!? *sarcasm* So we cover our eyes to what is going on. *sigh* We dismiss these events assuming that someone higher up than us is surely attending to the problem (dream on!). Though we would never admit it, we take comfort in thinking that people more in the know and influential—people with more status, degrees, power—are on the front line and will certainly make better decisions than we ever could. So doing, we blind ourselves to the fact that these people in charge are blinded and made stupid by their greed and self-interest. They see dimly, if at all, through that screen at the dire prospects they are juggling with. With such tunnel vision, they are hardly capable of seeing the interests of humanity, let alone acting on them. Furthermore, they console themselves with the thought that someone else higher up—or not, often just someone other than them—is “certainly” taking care of “the big things.” Ultimately, people are passing the buck ALL the way up…to God. Seriously, this theological cul-de-sac is the ultimate, most reliable, place of retreat for the theistic as well as most of the non-theistic, if people were to be honest about their thoughts. But this is the most comforting of cop-outs and the greatest excuse to carry on acting recklessly out of all-too-trivial motivations of unhinged greed and blind self-interest. What is worse is these things are only the tiny beginnings of much more that is bound to happen. If we do not listen up, and wake up, we’ll be just as unprepared and helpless when the even more dire and apocalyptic events unfold. This is not a time to curl up under the covers.