On the Side of a Pot-holed Road

“When we give up false hopes, when we see human nature and history for what they are, when we accept that progress is not preordained, then we can act with an urgency and passion that comprehends the grim possibilities ahead.” Chris Hedges, columnist, Truthdig

The lawn at my in-laws house is dying, and it is not alone; many lawns are dying here on the Platinum Coast. The drought continues in California, in the same inexorable manner that conflict in the Middle East continues. I fill a two-gallon can with water and pour it around the base of the fig tree, then refill the can and do the same for the avocado tree. The fig tree looks healthy, despite the drought, but I don’t think the avocado is going to make it.

My mother-in-law has been ill with a bacterial infection; my father-in-law has early Alzheimer’s. My wife and I are witness to their slow, steady decline. My father-in-law hides screwdrivers and light bulbs and AA batteries, and then cannot remember where he hid them. He shuffles around the garage, searching in vain for these things. It’s heartbreaking to watch, but it is life, the way it goes for every single human being. We are prone to illness, disease, decline and death. No way around it. We have to reconcile ourselves to these facts at the same time we try to live with hope and purpose.

The hope part is difficult, for me, very difficult. I see the stupidity and cupidity of my own government, the venality of corporate leaders, and the vacuity of most of the American media establishment, and I feel despair, not hope. Take what’s happening in Iraq for example. The US has led a campaign of airstrikes against ISIS targets for the past ten months, and yet ISIS was able last week to seize the city of Ramadi. As is becoming commonplace, the Iraqi security forces that the US spent nearly a decade training and equipping, turned tail and retreated, leaving weapons and other equipment behind.

Americans are told – indoctrinated is more accurate – to believe that our military power can solve any problem; our aircraft and bombs, our pilots, our technology, are of such quality that we can pick out a single target – a bad guy – and take him out, him alone, without collateral damage. This is insane bullshit, of course, but many of my countrymen buy it, particularly over a patriotic weekend like this one. But if we are so awesome, why is ISIS able to grab more territory and spread more terror?

Americans seem to me like a nation of people with their heads jammed deep in the sand. We have allowed corporate and government power to form a real evil axis, and we can see – or would be able to see if we looked closely – that the one reinforces the rule of the other. Corporations and the wealthy buy political favors from politicians, and politicians write laws to reward their corporate benefactors. Democracy is essentially a joke because voters are never given a choice between any real alternatives; our choices lie within a narrow spectrum that center on the infallibility of capitalism and the projection of military might. No line of questioning or thought, and no policy proposal that seriously challenges the acceptable spectrum, is allowed a hearing. Our political leaders do not answer to us – they have another constituency and they serve it with slavish devotion. Democracy is a meaningless label. Without real choices of parties and candidates, voting is a waste of time.

How is one to be hopeful when the most critical issue of our time, human alteration of the earth’s climate, is simply ignored by our corporate masters and their political lackeys? Oil company CEO’s and their brigades of lawyers and lobbyists will go to their graves protesting that the science isn’t definitive, that there is still a shred of doubt that burning oil and coal and fracking for natural gas is harmful to the environment. They might be choking, but they will not recant the insane beliefs that lined their purses.

The financial elites that make money playing games with money, who never build anything of lasting value, who take and take and take, will go to their graves insisting that financial capitalism is the greatest evolutionary development in the history of the world. Forget that it produces, all over the planet, stupendous wealth for some, staggering misery for millions, and environmental degradation for all of us.

The hope and change bandwagon broke down on the side of a pot-holed road years ago. Thieves stole the tires, the rims and hubcaps; scavengers stripped the machine of everything that was left.