Trains of Thought

Where does one build hope when so much good faces so much destruction? Escapism? Stoicism? Radicalism? Accept that this window of time we live through is a hallway to a next experience? Accept that effectively everything is beyond our individual control? Accept that new avenues to shared humanity must be built in innovative ways?

“Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what’s going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That’s the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won’t make time stand still.” - Haruki Murakami

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

“Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet—and this is its horror—it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.” - Hannah Arendt

I drive to work on roads paved across vast flatlands industrialized into expansive vineyards and orchards, criss-crossed by high voltage cables flying between substations stacked with grey equipment.

Electrical substation next to an almond orchard on a foggy day.

In a lot of ways it is still a natural place, this shrinking patch of agrarian country between rail-linked farm towns and bedroom communities. The rabbits and foxes and coyotes and owls and hawks and vultures still claim their place in the landscape. It contains trees and vines. The earth still meets the sky, free from a paved membrane. When the weather is right, the air is clear and clean; a stunning view of the Sierra Nevada and the Coastal Ranges can be viewed on either side of the fertile valley they bracket.

But the creatures are thrashed and maimed by cars and trucks traveling on the grid of asphalt highways that quilt the patchwork farmland. The trees and vines are planted in orderly rows. The hands of untold immigrants have pruned and shaped them so exactingly that one might struggle to discriminate any vine or tree from the next. The surface of the earth is packed by heavy tractors; it is processed with myriad fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides needed to successfully implement industrial monoculture farming. Nearby mountain ranges are, on most days, obscured by air pollution. It is unnatural nature.

Outside of religion are two kinds of faith: good and bad. In America, we prize good faith—honesty of intention—among laborers; we prize bad faith—an intent to deceive—among the ruling class. Our society reveres the ruling celebrity class and we hold aspirations of future membership, despite knowing the near-impossibility of such ascension. Yet, the bad faith of those lords, barons, and representatives is what trickles down to the masses. Certainly not their wealth. Many among the lower classes emulate the behavior of those we wish to join. And thus, bad faith pervades society from top to bottom.

These tracks have been laid for centuries, as long as locomotives have been around and more. The inevitability of this moment is tied to those lines and few options remain. Full steam ahead? Derail? Slowly build an arc in the track, toward a new compass point?

The way forward seems lost in a dense Tule fog, intensified by human pollution. Moving through the cloud is a lonely journey. One cannot see clearly into the distance; specters shift and fade at the edge of sight. Certainty dissipates in the mist.

***

But fog burns off and vision gains clarity. Roasting firelight washes over deception. And the radiating heat emphasizes the perversity of our unnatural machinations.

It is possible, it is necessary that Americans learn to better see humanity; to understand what motivates others. Empathy and discernment are vital components to keeping this train on the tracks. We must embrace the honesty of workers and caretakers and creators while turning away from the deception required to become extractors and enforcers and influencers.

There is an inevitability to the unnatural reality of human dominion over the world. We cannot deny that our natural impulses have been harnessed in unnatural ways. Our drives and tastes have been tethered to increasingly synthetic behaviors. The capitalists’ umbilical has been plugged in, we are fed garbage and told it’s delicious. It will now take immense effort to discern reality from fiction, good from bad, and charity from greed. New systems of checks and balances will have to be built and society must relearn the meaning of words like ‘humane’ and ‘civilization’ where they have been supplanted by greed and malice.

The human population grew so large and the life expectancies extended as a result of expanding our shared knowledge about the natural world. It required vaster food stores than ever before. And the industrialization, then capitalization of agriculture, followed by the rest of the globe became the game. This experiment with 8 billion people couldn’t sustain itself without the unnatural existence of food farming as we know it today.

But none of this will exist if we continue to pursue the manifest destiny laid before us by preceding generations of greed. Their archaic desires would railroad our future. We learned to tame the natural world but ignored the lessons of its wildness. We’ve forgotten what it is to stand in a forest miles from another human, or summit a mountain and strain for oxygen, or feel the fatigue of one’s muscles treading in the swell of our oceans. We can plant an orchard on land taken by genocide to leverage the economic value of fruit, but the great context of the world reminds us that a random tree may let loose to fall on your head, the delirium of high altitude may induce you to lie down and freeze to death, and muscles may give out leaving you to simply, quietly slip beneath the surface of the waves.

I seek freedom from fear.

I seek courage to change the unnatural, grotesque world wrought by vile, greedy and apathetic humans.