SEASON OF DEATH

“Keep looking for buzzards.”

“I’ll do that.”

They tell us this is going to be a hot summer.  Hotter than last year and the year before that.  It’s hard to think that it could get worse.  And it’s even harder to imagine that there’re those who want to ignore the facts that temperatures worldwide continue to rise.  We’re told that any immediate actions would be bad for the economy.  Pray tell, who but the most naïve buys into that sort of rhetoric?  Don’t they understand that increasing temperatures, failing reservoirs, continued droughts, doomed crops will bring about an unimagined economic collapse?  It’s as if a nightmare has befallen us.  Everywhere we look the news is grim.  And yet, people seem to hold on to their delusions as if to do otherwise is worse than the reality they have entered.

Along the Borderlands separating the United States and Mexico people still journey north.  To the south in Mexico the crime and killings and chaos seems to increase monthly.  In fact, Mexico was recently named the second most dangerous country in the world following close behind Syria.  Mexican officials refuse to accept that status.  Regardless, in the United States there is little empathy for Mexico.  On the one hand, Mexico provides the slave labor that has been the heart of American growth for over two-hundred years.  On the other hand, Mexico delivers the riches that so many in the US have become wedded to as Mexico’s drug industry pumps billions into the US economy yearly.  As one US official told me not long ago: “No one on [the US side of the border] wants to stop the drugs because there’s too much money in it.”

And so it goes.  The process is insidious; and people seem to have become desensitized to the reality of dying lands.  If you could step back a hundred and fifty years and then be transported to the present you’d conclude that things have already collapsed.  And yet, like the frog placed into a pot of water that’s brought slowly to a boil, people today go about their business steeped in avarice and rapaciousness as if resources are endless and everything will be okay.  The latest incarnation of Joachim of Fiore comes from the tech world that preaches that old and worn out doctrine that technology will save us.

The Borderlands offer a unique analogy for this time.  In the weeks to come the heat will press into the ground and then radiate back into the air; and in secluded places where shade suffers its own grief and offers little solace some will believe they can survive.  Like others on a grander stage they will put their trust in people they do not know, people who lie to them and tell them things will be better.  And when they are abandoned they will wander around lost and scared.  Their limited resources will be gone within hours.  The heat and exhaustion will make them crazy.  Their panic will overcome them and they will eventually give up and fall to the ground.  They believed without questioning because they wanted to believe.  So we will keep our eyes on the skyline watching for buzzards.