Last year, during the Keystone XL Pipeline vote in Congress,
Greg Grey Cloud was arrested for singing an honor song about everything
returning to harmony. Ever since then I’ve found myself clinging to the harmony
concept like I would a life raft, especially when I’m drowning in environmental
petitions on Facebook.
There was an earthquake in 2011 that, according to the U.S.
Geological Survey, moved the main island of Japan eight feet and shifted the
Earth on its axis. Inuit elders have written to NASA warning of the Earth’s shift;
they claim the sun no longer rises where it used to and the moon and stars are placed
differently. Considering how much time this tribe spends in darkness, star
placement is definitely their bag, baby. I, on the other hand, can only tell if
it is the big dipper or the little dipper when I can compare them side by side in
the night sky.
If we are anything right now, as a planet, we are out of
balance. Future earthquake-caused shifts (and the weight of more water in the
oceans putting pressure on the plates and therefore causing more earthquakes)
could significantly change life as we know it on Earth. And don’t even get me
started on the dams; the weight of the stagnant water and silt piling up is
making the Earth bloated. Water needs to move, and eventually— with, or without,
our dam obstruction— it will.
What I hope is happening, is that the planet is flipping
over, giving the Southern Hemisphere a turn on top. (Of course, in space there
is no top or bottom, that’s all propaganda from the guys making the maps.) But
what I fear is happening, is that we are causing irreparable changes to our
planet in the name of negligence and greed. And in this society, instead of
respected elders, we’ve got reverted-to-seventh-grade-mentality elders. What is
it with the texting and tweeting while the President of the United States addresses
the nation?! Are you freakin kidding me? You’re not even allowed to text in
seventh grade Social Studies class.
Today’s government is comparable to melee on a playground; we,
the people, are pinned down by the corporations, with our faces in the dirt, while
Congress argues with itself over who has the ball and then hands over our lunch
money every single time. Recently Colorado dodged the ball that was SB 232, a hop-scotch
to jeopardizing our public lands through the subterfuge that is state
management. I now realize why the Koch Twins made such large campaign
contributions in the last election, as they are poised to buy the western half
of this country so they can lay pipe all over the goddamn place (even as the
correlation between fracking and earthquakes becomes more apparent with each
new day.)
“Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking
water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical
warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist.” Winona Laduke
Let’s face it; our planet is in the discount bin because of
corporate greed, and our government has forfeited the people for the profits. The
recent give-away of sacred Apache land in Arizona to a foreign mining company
because of the copper deposits buried deep underground is just another shining example
of how it works; Congress giving away land that isn’t theirs to give for copper
that won’t be ours to sell. It makes me irate that it’s legal for a foreign corporation
to take possession of land already owned, but it’s illegal for the owners of that
land to protest the land grab.
But then I remind myself to take a mental step back, to think
about humans in the big picture, and harmony in the end, and I do feel better.
Sure, it’s a hard realization that in the sea of life our individual little
boats don’t really matter, but it’s massively reassuring to know that the other
side of that coin is that we can’t frack up the whole world— beyond our own
existence, that is. The Earth will be fine, upside down or not. We, on the
other hand, may be lost at sea without so much as a dipper to guide us.
