Sitting on the balcony. Gorgeous day. A sleepy Sunday in Richmond, VA.
Spring has sprung here. The birds are ecstatic, constant motion and sound, celebrating the abundance, the deliverance from a season of want, of need. The squirrels are playing, chasing each other for no other reason than it’s fun to run on a sunny spring day. The insects have emerged from their emergent state, breaking out to pollinate or annoy, each to its purpose, undisturbed.
People go by now and again, walking the dogs that are blissfully unaware of why their human is around all the time, but grateful. Might add up to a few extra walks a week, and with the world reawakening to its annual rebirth, how could that be bad?
From my balcony, it all looks so normal, predictably so.
Inside it’s all dfferent.
So here’s to hanging out on the balcony. Here’s to toasting the natural world for moving on. For walking a dog, smelling a flower, shooing a mosquito, cowering from a hornet, listening to the avian songs of hope.
It’s kind of fascinating to watch. It becomes very clear that the elimination of people from the equation immediately leads to global healing. China’s air pollution is way down, Los Angeles’s too. The canals of Venice are clear and dolphins have appeared. While humans suffer, all the other elements that make up our bioshpere are celebrating, breathing, singing, swimming, laughing, chasing, playing. It’s graphic and undeniable.
Nothing will be learned by this, of course. As soon as we are able we will attack again, most likely with a vengeance to make up for lost time. Factories will belch poison, waste will be dumped where waste never should be, straws will be consumed like oxygen. Continue the list.
So look carefully at what the rest of the natural world is trying to say.
For whom does the bird sing? It sings for you.
So the good news of all this is, we are NOT killing the planet. It is perfectly capable of healing itself, left to its own devices. No, we are only committing suicide. People may disappear, but the planet will be fine, spinning on as we choose annihilation.
It won’t be the virus. This is not a continuation of the dire warnings my posts have become. That will cull the herd a tad, but the real pandemic will appear after the virus has been corraled.
We are the pandemic.
Humans, clutching, needing, grasping , hoarding, arrogant, blind. In the 60s, Buckminster Fuller wrote that the world had enough to allow every human to survive quite comfortably, thank you, if that was important. Ghandi observed that we had enough for every person’s need, but not for every person’s greed. These people were pleading for human sanity 60 years ago.
We will have none of it, of course. There are many who see the economy as the thing most at risk right now, not human beings. When we come out of hiding that economy will be prioritized in a way that benefits the hoarders, Trump’s “winners”, the monied class, because they wield the levers of power. Enough of the rest of us will be preserved to keep the machinery of great wealth moving. Will you have tiny hands that can polish the inside of a shell casing? Can you operate a computer well enough to aid in accounting? No?
Shame.
We will come out of this, no matter how we respond, in a financial tailspin. Whether the masses are honored by the bailout or discarded, at the other end we will have massive debt and unpayable deficits. The next step will be the elimination of “bloat”. All things deemed “unnecessary” for the continued viability of an economy will be excised, and what is considered “unnecessary” will tell you everything you need to know about our country’s, and the world’s, priorities.
The fault lines in the U.S. will, amazingly, remain unchanged. The GOP is months away from an all out assault on anything, I mean ANYTHING, that is helpful to people in need. Military spending will most likely increase, industrial bailouts will abound, protections that cost industry money will continue to be unwound, all on the altar of economic survival. Top down thinking that has landed us in an era of economic injustice that we have not seen before. The Robber Barons were the warm up act. These guys are the real McCoys.
So back to the balcony, where life is sweet, where systems work as they were intended, to a world where I can still cower to the threat of a stinger or giggle at the mischief of an adolescent rodent. That a chorus of birds, ignorant of their timbre or rhythm or pitch, still manage a brilliant unified symphony of life as it was intended, as it was abandoned. A nostalgic peak of what was important and lost.
Each moment is a lesson. What will we learn?