2008 Woodie Awards
But It is Traditional
Alan Nordstrom
Issue date: 4/28/06 Section: Opinions
- Page 1 of 1
Two common reasons we give for letting our world go to hell are:
(1) that we humans are just essentially evil, living under the sway of the devil and thus are programmed to self-destruct and to take down the rest of creation with us, as the Bible prophesies; and
(2) that even if obliteration is not fated metaphysically, we're just too stupid as a species to handle responsibly the powers that our amazing intellect is birthing in the world; thus our narrow-minded collective idiocy will prevail over the better wisdom of an ineffectual minority who will cry in the wilderness till Doomsday.
Because we allow one or the other of these traditional assumptions to possess us, we do not rouse ourselves from the stupor that befuddles us to imagine a plan for our awakening. Could we awake to wisdom, we would recognize the folly of our errant course as the subduers and dominators of this tortured planet.
Rightly awakened, we would recognize our ravenous habits to be barbaric, marauding, rapacious and ruinous, and we would peer beyond the beguiling billboards set up by commerce inducing us to consume and consume until the planet itself perishes of consumption.
Yet we remain benighted, like the hidebound villagers in Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery," or like the "stone age savage" neighbor of Robert Frost's in "Mending Wall" who kept repeating his father's ancient pointless saying: "Good fences make good neighbors."
Likewise saith we: "Good billboards sell more stuff," and then we chant the venerable mantra of General Electric: "Progress Is Our Most Important Product," never asking wither we're progressing or what the final cost.
Frightened as we are now about what the avian flu will do to us, we yet ignore the terminal threat of our pandemic Affluenza.
(1) that we humans are just essentially evil, living under the sway of the devil and thus are programmed to self-destruct and to take down the rest of creation with us, as the Bible prophesies; and
(2) that even if obliteration is not fated metaphysically, we're just too stupid as a species to handle responsibly the powers that our amazing intellect is birthing in the world; thus our narrow-minded collective idiocy will prevail over the better wisdom of an ineffectual minority who will cry in the wilderness till Doomsday.
Because we allow one or the other of these traditional assumptions to possess us, we do not rouse ourselves from the stupor that befuddles us to imagine a plan for our awakening. Could we awake to wisdom, we would recognize the folly of our errant course as the subduers and dominators of this tortured planet.
Rightly awakened, we would recognize our ravenous habits to be barbaric, marauding, rapacious and ruinous, and we would peer beyond the beguiling billboards set up by commerce inducing us to consume and consume until the planet itself perishes of consumption.
Yet we remain benighted, like the hidebound villagers in Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery," or like the "stone age savage" neighbor of Robert Frost's in "Mending Wall" who kept repeating his father's ancient pointless saying: "Good fences make good neighbors."
Likewise saith we: "Good billboards sell more stuff," and then we chant the venerable mantra of General Electric: "Progress Is Our Most Important Product," never asking wither we're progressing or what the final cost.
Frightened as we are now about what the avian flu will do to us, we yet ignore the terminal threat of our pandemic Affluenza.
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