Wednesday, April 22, 2015

earth day and fatalism

So, I wrote this and left it to languish in drafts because nobody wants to read this... but then I just saw this tweet, and I thought, well, yeah, I relate. It's not just me.

Evidently, the best thing humans can do to help the Earth, is to die. I'll be ineffectively picking up empty Capri Sun's on my hike instead.

Babies. I love them. I adore them. I wanted them so, so much.

But it's a lot more complicated having them now than it was. And yet, clearly it was then too, because look what's happened to the human race over the generations. We're a mess of violence and insecurity and war and hatred as much as we ever were, despite all the right-headed isms we've invented as we work towards some sort of psychological evolution that continues to elude us.

I think we should stop having babies. Maybe utterly, in the way so exactly suggested by Matthew McConnahey's Rust in True Detective. Nothing I've ever seen has so perfectly expressed my fatalistic world view. At the core of it, this is what I believe in. It wars with any optimism I have, like that which allowed me to have my children; with one, to continue the pregnancy, with the other, to conceive intentionally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRtxe7b_SQQ

Sorry, big mean tv corporation won't let us embed it anymore.

I judge everyone. I judge myself most of all, for my weakness, and laziness and uselessness, for not providing a safe feeling home for my children, for never walking the walk, but also those of us who choose to have five babies and go on being exhausted and bitchy and cramped and impoverished, or those of us who believe that breastfeeding is a woman's choice and not a baby's right, and those of us who fight for the right to slap children or hound our trans children to suicide or all of us who feed our children crap then pump them full of drugs to compensate and wonder where the eczema and asthma and cancer come from.

I judge us all, and excited as I am when people tell me they're having a baby, or another baby, I think of our violent birth practices and our 'inexplicable' increasing auto-immune disorders and god, circumscision that I thankfully didn't have to fight off here, and school, and PND and all the above. And I think only a select few should breed and parent. Not me. Maybe you, maybe not.

I liked that Alan Tudyk tweeted that. I agree with him on all points. Except for that extraneous apostrophe. Time for me to go walk the dog and try and pick up litter. 

3 comments:

Ms. Moon said...

Well, to paraphrase something I said in my post today, "Sometimes all we can do is just not good enough."

Mwa said...

While you are completely right, I don't see how despair helps anyone. We didn't personally ruin the world. And now that so many things are fucked up, we may as well be happy and create beauty. Is how I see it.

Sabine said...

So you had me thinking for a good while and then this quote popped up:

"I don’t have any answers, if by answers we mean political systems, better machines, means of engineering some grand shift in consciousness. All I have is a personal conviction ... that something big is being missed. That we are both hollow men and stuffed men, and that we will keep stuffing ourselves until the food runs out, and if outside the dining room door we have made a wasteland and called it necessity, then at least we will know we were not to blame, because we are never to blame, because we are the humans."

It's from here:
https://orionmagazine.org/article/confessions-of-a-recovering-environmentalist/

What I am trying to come to terms with is that I feel very much like you do. I want my daughter to have kids, very much so, and at the same time I am relieved that she doesn't want to (yet?) because I fear for the coming generations. Of what they have to face. It's a huge fear. I wish I could just ignore it.