While it's true these are serious times, some of the things we choose to get serious above show our frustration and helplessness over our inability to effect the kind of change that works for all of us. No one wants war except those like Dick (where's my conscience) Cheney who would sell his own mother on Mother's Day if it put a few extra pieces of silver in his personal bank account.
The frustration over having to wait until the next election to vote out even more of Congress members who still don't get it, does boil over into our personal lives. One example is what happened on two of the mailing lists I'm on--huge arguments broke out over bees. Yes, it is scary to recall Einstein telling us we would know our doom was upon us when the bees disappeared. They are the canary in the coal mine warning us we can't keep consuming and abusing the way we are. But there is no one reason for this just as there is no one reason the planet is dying.
Cell phones and pollution and pesticides and replacing of bee friendly environments with asphalt and concrete all have an effect. Yet arguments broke out over whether those of us who use cell phones were contributing to the doom of the planet. Of course we are, just as everyone who takes a drink of water, eats some food, wears clothing on their bodies, uses some form of heat to keep themselves warm and chooses to live somewhere besides a cave naked and cold and half starved is contributing to our eventual doom.
Yes, we can argue about it and call each other names, but that's not going to change the fact that we all have to give up something. Will it be electricity because in the last six months I've watched both a raccoon and a squirrel get sacrificed in a blazing finale of getting too close to that transformer thing so I could have light at night? Will it be the rodents my neighbor trapped and killed because they were chewing into his underground phone line? Will it be my other neighbor's son who just left for Iraq so we can drive cars and get Agra-biz fruits and veggies delivered to us any time of year? Will it be our civil liberties because we couldn't be bothered to vote? Will it be our right to choose because we didn't take seriously a few religious wackos who paraded around with fetuses in pickle jars? Will it be our country because we have a President who thinks the Rapture is a foreign policy? Will it be greed, selfishness, hatred, and the need to force our personal beliefs on a sleeping and unconscious public that eventually brings us down? Or will it be a war that was somewhere else and perpetuated by warmongers who care nothing about human life and care only about power and money? What will get us in the end? What distraction will take our eyes off the real problems?
This week it is bees that set off the alarms. And yes, we need to have the alarms set off. But we don't need to fight with each other over bees. We need to see that bees are an indicator species of how much time we have left if we do nothing but argue with each other. If we choose not to act, then of course Einstein will be right. But if we choose to take responsibility for our planet, for our daily lives, for the things that politicians do in our names, then maybe we have a chance to survive and so do the bees.
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What Disappearing Bees Really Mean
