“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.
