The Care and Feeding of Complacency

On the cover of Time this week, (3 Apr 2006) is a special report on global warming, “Be Worried. Be VERY Worried,” says the cover with the polar bear stranded on melting ice.

“Look on this picture and weep over it!” wrote Thomas Paine in the darkest days of the revolution. Is anyone today weeping? Is anyone really worried?

I am worried. I wring my hands, ask myself what I can do. The one thing I know how to do is write. I have spent months writing pages for the Web site and now feel foolish for overkill. I fear I’ll numb people’s minds with my slew of words.

But what else do you in an emergency? You scream and yell for help. As Thomas Paine also wrote: “There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one.”

I don’t know how else to say it but in these stark words, Please help, please join me, please let’s do something, please let’s take the next step, please let’s combine our strength, please let's move this crazily tilting planet toward sanity.

All my arguments, all my trying to come up with the "just right" combination of words... It's time wasted. There is no way to argue people into taking action – they must be moved from within.

On one hand, I am sure that we must all be painfully aware of complacency sticking to us like a suffocating gel, we must all be feeling equally desperate to get it off, get it off -- and move and do something! But so many folks have banged the gong to get the attention of the townsfolk that no one pays attention anymore. The sky is falling, quite literally these days, warming and falling and flooding the earth – but we are too busy to stop and do anything.

I know I am busy to the point of weeping – last night putting my son to bed, I felt caught in the relentless flow of daily activity, in which some work/parenting/family activity is required of me at nearly every moment of the day. Like being dragged around on a non-stop merry-go-round, it gives the impression that each day is the same as the last, that everything will continue indefinitely in this numbing rhythm. Thus complacency is fed and grows thick.

Even though each day feels the same for me, it is not the same day for the planet, not after absorbing another 24 hours worth of damage inflicted on it by me and my overflowing trash can and my water down the drain and my conspicuous comsumption. The sands of the hourglass are running out, even faster than anyone could have predicted – or so says Time magazine.

Of course, as I learned from reading Michael Lerner the other day, it is not our self-interest or our will to survive that motivates selfless action. Self-interest usually only kicks in at the last hour, when the problem comes barreling through the front door in a flood or with a gun or an eviction notice – when it is too late to do anything about it. No -- any effort we make toward a better world rises only from internal values.

I've got the words from that Les Miserables song stuck in my head -- “Will you join in our crusade? Who will be strong and stand with me? Beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see?" Such nice stark words.