By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
Take paradise, put up a parking lotBig Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell, (c) 1970
Often, when I read the headlines over at Huffy or elsewhere around the web, the hum of guitar strings begins deep in my brain, teasing me to channel Joni Mitchell. While the thrust of Big Yellow Taxi was environmental back in the day, it seems to me that the environment isn’t merely the natural kingdom, it’s human nature as well. Until we take on our full measure of humanness, we’re just mammals riding Gaia like all the rest. The ruined splendor of the physical Earth is coming back to bite us in extreme weather, but that is not the only price we pay for having fancied ourselves separate from her.
What we do means very little in the long term if we’re too busy paving over the paradise of this unique place and space to notice that we’re killing ourselves. It’s one thing to court disaster (climate, financial, you name it) without being aware that we’re doing it; it’s quite another to rush at it full-tilt-boogie in some kind of deluded nationalistic fog based on a paradigm breathing its last. Observing the ramifications of the destruction we’ve accomplished in these last decades, and pondering what conservatives are still determined to accomplish, puts me into a funk every time I think about it.
If I weren’t absolutely convinced that things have to get worse before they get better, I’d be a good deal more discouraged than I am. But everything I see around me is a wake-up call, every idiotic thing I read in the headlines is another vivid illustration that the political machinery in this nation is obsolete, throwing gears and billowing smoke into the air with a vengeance. For years before the sharp-edged imperative that we feel now, I told my Political Waves readers that bandaids slapped on the gaping wounds of our failing systems wouldn’t accomplish much, we needed some clean breaks with what was no longer workable. I think we’re closing in on that decisive moment, don’t you?