THE CLEANSING

     Imagine if the title for today's posting was actually the title for a movie. One would imagine it as a member of the increasingly dark movies of the day wherein the sins of humanity, as a whole, or in part, are cleansed through the mechanism of some disaster, short or ongoing. This genre is dark, imagines all sorts of strange things such as not being able to hear or see or talk or can, but better not!
    Now imagine our world, the world of today, rife with massive burnoffs of land and oxygen generating forests. The latest? The monthslong bushfire of Australia with the latest being that thousands are trapped on beaches with no land route out to safety, and right near populatd cities as well. Now add the additional layer of oceanic swamping of lands, of island nations, of coastal areas.
      Throw in a pandemic or two in which we have no idea as to exactly what it is, how it spreads and how to cure it. Multiply the deaths of the Black Plague in the 1300's of Europe and well, here we are, with an earth on the fringes, the edges, of a crumbling cliff and all we are doing is using it as a tourist site rather than fixing it. So as the world turns becomes as the world burns, in more ways than one.
     Back to the movie we are making. We borrow a phrase from Star Trek. "Survival is insufficient" and we realize that survivng as modern day cave people is not the answer. We must remain mankind, a symbol of hope, of progress, of a world where once we flourished, had a Renaissance, a growth and blooming of ideas, of philosophy, of science - but also a new world in which we recognize the need to set a boundary and hold to it. There are just some places humanity cannot go, at least not until we mature a hell of a lot more!
     Assume we actually manage to repair the earth, something looking not so likely at this point, as we enter the last decade of what will be a viable earth. By 2030 we are apparently to be in a world vastly changed, with awful conditions, and nowhere to go, no place to turn. Now as we welcome in 2020 perhaps it is time we think of cleansing, but in a different way, in a positive way.
     Cue entry: Enter mankind. Enter man, who then intones a soliloquy wherein he wonders how to go forward. He proposes audacious plans, challenging plans, but manages to find reasons to cancel all. The reaason? Lack of trust in man to do the right thing, to put aside the need to "get stuff", to want more and more and more, never mind the damage this greed does. The worst roadblock is the factor of trust.
     How do we trust mankind which has brought us to existential horror? Andre Malraux said, "Man is not what he thinks he is; man is what he hides inside." Really. Think about it. How many people throughout history have managed to hide their true selves until it was too late to stop them without great costs? How many people do we know today who wish to hide all about themselves? Think Trump. Think McConnell. Think every single parroting Republican who refuses to be a truth seeker, a true fan of justice.
     How are we to go forward when we praise a war criminal, whose brothers in arms call a "psychopath , freaking evil"? How are we to go forward when a daughter of the president, a 'senior' staff member, when asked about 900 children deemed lost, separated from parents with no records to enable reunion with parents, states that that is not hers to worry about, not within her portfolio of concerns!! Really? Would she feel the same if her children were taken away from her, never to see them again? Oh, wait, she now claims membership in the Jewish people, so that is not even a far fetched thought, is it!!
     What is the matter with us , so much so that we have retrogressed in the past three years to such a degree that it should frighten one to the nth degree. How could we have made progress on acceptance, on plurality, on inclusiveness, on women's equality, on recognition of the environmental disasters we must reckon with, deal with, about the importance of globality, not nationalism, white supremacy, or the supremacy of any one particular group over others? Why have we allowed slavery to rear its ugly head, coming out of the closet for rather than secretly holding people slaves, they are sent to reeducation camps,  a misnomer for prison - and take away their children, watch the tragedy develop, but because the Chinese are a trade partner we are mum about the whole thing.
     Tonight, as you watch the fireworks, or the ball drop, or the band breaks out in Olde Lang Syne, think about next year or ten years hence. What is really inside you? Is it what we need to save this earth, to save ourselves, or are we doomed to continue down this dead end, to be, one day, a tourist site for archeological fans, a lesson for others, a more recent example of the meaning of the line from Shelley: "My name is Ozymandias...
Look on my works.... and despair."
     A lesson to be learned. A lesson to be internalized. A lesson that is begging to be heard and acted upon. A lesson we had better take to heart or we will despair and the world will be cleansed, but not in a movie - in reality.