Having walked into the living room and seeing the television was on, in particular the news, I was left in no doubt we live in disharmony. This does sound like one of those “well duh” statements but then as we seem so determined not to do anything about it maybe it isn’t quite so obvious as first thought. The headline story was a fire breaking out in Moria refugee camp on the Greek Island of Lesvos. They avoided throwing accusations out there but it’s pretty clear there will be plenty of legitimate ones involving local fascists, and that is what they are that is not hyperbole. What happens next as over ten thousand people, including thousands of children, spend the foreseeable future living rough on the local hillside is anyone’s guess. This story was followed by a quick report on wild fires raging across California and on the fact they have so far destroyed five whole towns as well as the resulted in the largest financial cost from fire damage in the states history. After this I left the room.
Fire may be the main focus of these stories but one represents our inability to coexist as a species and the other to coexist with the planet. The end result of both will be our own destruction. There is a George Carlin joke about the Earth and humans, I have probably mentioned it on here before, but he suggests the earth will be fine it’s us who’s fucked. The earth will just shake us off like a bad case of the fleas. That is paraphrased of course but the gist is a familiar one. If we’re not living harmoniously with ourselves or our environment we will be the ones to lose out. Countless memes describing the human species as nothing more than a pestilence, the earth has caught a human cold. In a contemporary reference the earth may have just contracted a virus.
How can’t we live in harmony then. It is easy to point out what is wrong with the world and ourselves but to suggest ways to fix this are infinitely harder. We are becoming more polarised and disharmonious on a daily basis, despite the facade of action and rhetoric we’re actually doing less to combat the environmental damage we’re responsible for as a species. Somehow we need to come together once more. Unfortunately we only seem capable of this in times of crisis and while these things are a crisis they perhaps don’t quite seem so in real time. Somehow we need to allow people to continue living their comfortable lives while reducing the harmful affects of them or make them realise other people entering their society are not going to take everything they hold dear. Really I have no answers. Living as an example is one and showing examples on larger scales would be another but all it takes is a few weeks of intense media pressure and all the good work would be undone. In fact about one day would probably be enough. We are so individually disharmonious that how can we ever expect anything to change on a macro scale. Look within you say. Well that’s an interesting angle.
Observations and Misunderstandings 