Well, after spending much time toiling away on the bad things about humanity — and there are many — I’ve come around to wondering what’s the point of it all. What I’ve discovered is this: there isn’t any particular point to it. Probably humans aren’t going to last more than 300 years at the most. Well, there are things they could do to survive – maybe – but chances are our own greed and indulgences will take us down. The best thing we can do – I mean, really – is help reverse some of the damage we’ve caused. There is something about us humans that makes us just not care about others. Maybe we spend some time worrying about gun crime. Maybe we think about abused women or children. Maybe we think about starvation. Maybe we think about animal cruelty. But ultimately, we are not that great at really coming together for a common cause unless it serves us personally. Nothing has been more frustrating than to watch the so-called Bernie Sanders revolution, which was really just the far left’s version of the right wing movement: angry white males rising up from being oppressed. They use many different themes to cover up their general feeling of being losers – like income inequality, like the 1% and the oligarchy but if you scratch off the surface you’ll see the same thing on both sides: they feel like losers and they want to feel like winners.
Our country is going through a major shift that was probably awakened by the election of President Obama. That win told everyone that white men no longer rule, necessarily, and that now it’s time to level the playing field for the first time in American history. That a woman might lead is threatening on the heels of such a major shift. We’re also seeing the rise of LGBT and transgender rights. We’re seeing a population boom of hispanics. We’re seeing protests by Black Lives Matter. This election pitted the rise of women and minority groups vs. the white male power dynamic. So far, it looks like we’re winning but the refusal to accept this reality by the Sanders camp is just plain sad.
None of it matters in the grand scheme of things except what we can do today to help reverse the effects of climate change. That’s the main reason we can’t afford a Donald Trump – he thinks it’s a hoax. We are at the point where sea levels in 2100 will swallow up coastal cities. I don’t care so much that we’re wiping ourselves out. I worry about our kids surviving in this new changing climate but the real damage will be done to other living things as we march on wiping out species after species through hunting, population growth and climate change. We are destroying the world for everything else. Even if we somehow survive, we will have concluded our stay on this planet basically destroying it every living animal. Extinctions are not that rare, even mass extinctions. And sooner or later, even if we didn’t do it, probably something else eventually would, like another asteroid or super volcano. That we ourselves are the cause knowing how smart and capable we are is the part I can’t abide. Thus, electing the only democrat who could win this year was of utmost importance. So far, so good. We’ll see.
Here are the goals moving forward:
Fix the slaughterhouse problem here and throughout the world – that means stop torturing pigs, stop torturing calves for dairy (we do not need dairy at the amount that we consume it). The pigs must be treated better. Full stop. We must give them rights. We’re getting there.
Empty the tanks. There will be a point in our near future where we will be seen as barbarians for keeping orcas and dolphins in captivity for human entertainment.
Stop eating so much, stop wasting so much, stop generating so much trash.
Use the fields to grow food, not to feed livestock. It’s so simple, isn’t it?
Save the rain forests.
Cease reliance on fossil fuels (they’re going to run out in 50 years anyway).
Build cities for walking and bike riding. How hard can that be? It can’t be that hard.
These things are jus a start and they seem doable. Top of the list, though, is that humans have to stop eating so much meat. Period. Even if we don’t go vegan or even vegetarian, cutting out two meals of meat a day would help enormously. If we don’t, well, we know what will happen as a result.
Are things getting better? Maybe. We have a hive mind building on the internet and maybe it can be put to better use than shaming Justin Bieber on a daily basis.