We're All Poor

Ah, we're all poor. You're poor, I'm poor, Archie, or Fred, or whatever his name is, that US presididn't is poor. The planet is poor! It used to be rich. North American Plains Indians used to stand on their horses to see over the top of the grass in some places. There was fertile soil 50 feet deep. Once, not so very long ago, the tall and shortgrass prairies supported 70 to 75 million buffalo, 10 to 14 million elk; plus antelope and many other ruminants. Input? Sunshine and rain.

Today the same land is degraded: feedlots, barbwire fences, herbicides, John Deere, MF combines, countless millions in investment-- 45 million cattle! And some of them going mad: if not the cows, the disaffected "rugged individualist" farmers finding themselves turfed into the agribusiness manure-pile, rescued ocassionally by the military or militia. Timothy McVeigh had no mean argument that he was a returner of compliments.

That's it: riches to rags for the earth, and I doubt that it was brought about by the low self esteem of other animals. But humans couldn't handle being rich-- certainly not the bounty the last century brought. Father Industrial technology mated with Mother Earth and brought forth a present for humanity: a cornucopia that could make everyone rich, and free their days. So what did we do? We set Father to work eating mother: We kicked her teeth in, raked her to the bone with claws, whacked her skull in with a hammer. Knocked her down and tramped on her. Humans couldn't handle being rich. How could they? They'd been struggling with scarcities for the most part since they were knee-high to a... you name it. Since they were Mesozoic mammals in burrows waiting out the dinosaurs.

Scarcity was in their blood. Their bones! Their muscles. Their cartilege. Their teeth. Their "science of economics." They "were" scarcity, so to preserve what they "were," post-abundance, they applied their new magic to creating scarcity again; of making a desert of the land of milk and honey. The land of bilk and money. The land of exhaust and exhaustion.

The earth's a motley beggar circling the block. Mother Earth a bag lady. American consumerism and all the bright malls is a trinket in a box of Froot Loop poops. The sun pours gold into the sea out of inexhaustable riches so that even the poorest fisherman still trolls with golden hooks. We block the circle. We just say no.

We are rich! The human race is rich! We've reached the far border of the land of Nod! But what is that? It is a terror! An iotic minority carry the burden for us, they say "Me-- it's me." Ah. So it's them.