I grew up in Queens, NYC in the mid-Fifties. After the Second World War, many first generation Americans, whose parents migrated from all over Europe, were working hard to get out of the confines of their ghetto lives in crowded apartments all over the City. These are the people, who moved into houses like mine on 179th Street and 69th Ave. Jews led the charge in my neighborhood.
It would be hard to blame my people for being somewhat self-conscious at the end of the war. Many of the incredible opportunities that flourished back then were simply not available to them. The men worked hard and the mothers stayed home to take care of the kids and that is how it was. They wanted better lives for their children and education was the only way. It was very rare when any of my peers didn’t go to college and probably an embarrassment that involved some extenuating circumstance, talked about in whispers.
It was important to be intelligent for my generation. Queens harvested doctors, lawyers and even dentists. Our parents would die for the opportunity to introduce their son or daughter as a pre-med student at Columbia University. I squeaked into heavily subsidized, Queens College, part of the City’s higher education system. I wasn’t as bright as some of the seriously, nerdy Jewish kids, boys with pants up to their chins and awkward girls with precious few role models to show the way. I gave up my medical career, while staring down at a piglet carcass, arteries injected with a red rubbery substance and veins with a blue die. I simply didn’t have the discipline for years of school, running after students far brighter than myself.
Early, I knew I was going to have to get by on my wits and that I’d be earning a living from the neck up. I’ve never considered it a snobby thing, rather I wasn’t really good at anything and my brain was a default mechanism. Christ, I always got chosen for right field in ball games, but I still managed to stay out front.
I recently started thinking about all this when I read a study published by a number of scientists regarding the dire nature of our planet due to temperature rise, amongst other things. What got my attention was the premise that once we cross certain thresholds, a kind of fail safe mechanism will get activated and its consequences will be beyond our ability to mitigate. We live in such a dynamic system that pulling out just one card can cause a cataclysmic collapse and we are feverishly depleting the deck.
Back when I was striking out at stickball on 179th St, no one ever thought we could have an impact on our own survival on this planet, beyond cheap screen images of Godzilla. Even though I crapped out in medicine, I trusted intellect and it looked like we were getting smarter and smarter, and then came the explosion in knowledge generated by these new computers, the size of a library, with names like Univac.
For years now, some of the finest scientific minds in the world have been screaming at the top of their lungs that we are creating a revolution in our evolution. The gift and curse of intellect is trying to understand everything, unprepared for the emotional impact of its efforts. The idea that we are aggressively destroying the habitability of our only home has tapped into a fear we are ill-equipped to handle, our inevitable mortality.
Now comes the part you’re not going to like. How is it possible that these dire warning about our demise are being ignored? There are very, very powerful forces amongst us, who have a vested interest in taking every dollar they possibly can stuff in their pockets. These are people who buried their own scientific reports regarding the killing links between tobacco and cancer, followed years later by dirty proof that fossil fuel consumption jacks up global warming.
We are being kept so incredibly distracted by those monsters pulling our strings, puppets of the plutocracy. Trump is merely a tool, doing the bidding of the puppeteers. Our political system is totally polluted by money and our future and the future of our home is in the vice grip of these lying, opportunist bastards. We have marched through the millennia with a sense of purpose and entitlement, never imagining limitations, our own or Mother Earth. Tyrants, addicted to wealth and power have come and gone, but today is different, because it is institutionalized, tattooed into a fraction of our population.
I read that article with its frightening predictions and thought about how long this discussion has been going on and how little has been done. I remembered how I was brought up to believe being bright was cool and knowledge had real value. As I got older, I gradually began to understand the nature of awareness and I’m still working on it. Why isn’t the looming demise of our species not the number one priority? The predictions regarding the shocks from climate change are deadly and it doesn’t appear to matter.
We could become extinct because we are too damn smart for our own good. All prior, extinct species were innocent victims of nature’s whims and more recently, our insatiable greed. I read the news and I’ll tell you what’s not fake. Millions and millions of people are living in unspeakable poverty, many of them driven from their ancestral homes by policies intended to line the pockets of people who are already choking from excess. Gods are fighting each other and their followers are being sacrificed in their names. We are bleeding the life out of this planet and we will not survive. She will.
All of this insane, divisive and cruel drama is taking place on a global, earth stage that is rotting under the weight of a system that feeds the gluttonous oligarchy, who own our future. I was no genius as a kid, but I was pretty bright and I believed in science and trusted our intelligence. Absolutely everything I see today makes me certain we will never come together in time to stop the murderous machine of an angry planet. Sitting on the steps at 69-30 179th St as a young boy, I owned the precious optimism that fills tomorrows with promise. Today, I would be stupid if I didn’t see where we were all headed.