“Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
They say if you don’t want to make a stink steer away from religion and politics. Well, I’ve always been a little hard-headed.
Now, I don’t dare say that I’m so enlightened that I live in complete focus upon the here and now; however, I do focus on life. This life. And in doing so, I cannot help but feel enraged and at times helpless against the seeming futility of my ability to affect change upon what I see as a lost and destructive culture of atavistic greed. We don’t even have to look to the elite to see its impact upon our land and our people.
It’s as if the ascent to becoming a Have somehow divests one of the memories of having been a Have-Not.
Here in ‘Merica, where Capital is king, it’s frustrating to see a society of indifference toward our most valuable of all assets; human life — once it’s vacated the womb, that is — and the land we live upon. This is not exclusively an American issue, I know that, but the American experience is my experience, and so I speak from that point of view.
For decades industry has pillaged our land and people through politicized actions like eminent domain and strip mining. Forcing both people and wildlife out of their homes for the sake of short-term profits for a very few.
My slice of this country is often referred to as The Bible Belt, and for good reason. The populace of this region is easily buffeted to action by simple plays on their myopic and misunderstood theologies; deeply fallible hand-me-down rhetoric they can barely cite for themselves.
Hell not even all Republicans are bad. In fact, almost certainly no person is all bad — nor all good for that matter.
However, the Christian and the Republican have joined in a sort of political marriage here in the West, birthing a frightening Evangelical Nationalist movement. Especially here in the South. And behind closed doors, that marriage has invited in a poisonous bedfellow, Big Industry.
The Christian may not know about the liaison the Republican has with Industry, but I wager it’s less the not-knowing and more likely the not-acknowledging. I can’t speak for all sects of Christianity, but the evangelical south is all about saving face. The southern Christian will flat out deny any sort of scandal in order to maintain their social standing to the point of letting whatever that “scandal” may be ruin everything around them. They’ll participate in mental Olympics the likes of which could ensnare the cleverest minds by way of justifying something they know damn well to be morally wrong with some tenuous interpretation from their little holy book.
Having conversations about humanity and ecological conservation with these staunch Believer is often infuriating. Many of these conversations with family (and some friends) of the Christian ilk ultimately devolves to their dismissal of “matters of this world” for the reason that their life is not here but “with Jesus.” Which is to say, they don’t care about our tomorrow “here” because their tomorrow is “there.”
So, basically, fuck the rest of us.
Spelling it out this way to a Christian will certainly send them into a fit of “why I never’s” as they clutch their pearls and back pedal in attempt to clarify their position. But the fact of the matter remains that most of these folks — again not bad people per se — live disconnected from this life experience because they believe so adamantly in the promise of life-ever-after in some sort of heaven.
That core value is poison.
On the surface it may not look bad. Heaven may even sound like a nice place to some, though I argue the notion of lying at the feet of a space tyrant whose kingdom is lined with streets of gold sounds far too much like a Capitalist hell to me. To each their own.
The poison, though, is that ultimately this belief exonerates the believer from any sense of responsibility of ownership on this planet; it’s temporary.
Sebastian Junger in his book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging attributes littering to a lack of concern for one’s community due to a feeling or sense of not belonging, of not having ownership.
So, the belief that one is “not of this world” absolves one of ownership in matters this world.
And it fucking shows.
It is unanimously the Republican Right that marches industry across land and home, ravaging earth and family, and leaving utter devastation in its wake. To be fair, the Liberal Left has done damn near nothing to stamp out this out in the many years in which its held command of the highest order.
Once Industry consumes a region’s resources and leaves a wake of broken land and people behind, guess who foots the bill for social and economic repair? The tax payer. And not the corporate tax payer or the high-earning tax payer. No. The most meager earners among us.
How anyone with any sense of moral compass can turn a blind eye to this is beyond me. How anyone can look at what Industry has left in its wake in places like West Virginia or eastern Kentucky, how the land and people have been reduced to husks, how this is happening now in Alaska, how it’s actively in planning stages to happen in our national forests, how anyone can acknowledge this morally bankrupt dismissal of humanity and nature, and wave it away with some piss-ant piety like “I just have to let go and let God” is utter fucking insanity to me.
And yet, that very utter fucking insanity appears to account for dangerously-close-to half of our voting populace. So, as the poison of evangelical ideology continues to creep itself into American politics, laws, and legislation, we are seeing more and more of this mistreatment of human life — and natural wildlife — transpire with indifference, if not utter contempt, for both.
We watched the Patagonia film Public Trust last night, which is what stewed this sleeping rage inside of me. In that film, which I highly recommend, you’ll see that the current modus operandi of the Right, via financial motivations of Big Industry, is to evangelize and politicize the renouncement of our Public Lands.
With the promise of “trillions of dollars” and euphemisms like “energy independence,” the plan is to rescind federal ownership of Public Lands and turn them over to the states, which ultimately means, the lands — or at the very least the mineral rights — will be sold post-haste to private companies, whereupon they will be turned into dystopian oil mines, stripped completely of life and beauty and left for bare.
Left for the growing lower class to foot the bill for repair.
But, hey…some folks get to go be with Jesus, so really who gives a fuck, right?
