SATURDAY, FEB 11, 2023: NOTE TO FILE
There Are No Adults in the Room
Boys are us
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: SMALL ISLAND, FROM THE WIRES, BIG ISLAND, TOO MANY BOYS
Intro: "O brave new world, That has such people in't," is the human condition. Welcome to the Anthropocene, the world as real expansionist humans would make it. Know then the beast from within. Realize that there are no adults among us.
COOS BAY (A-P) — The room is as big as a planet. It is Earth Island. We, our strangers from within, arrived as children. There were no adults among us and we failed to give as jolly a good show as we credit ourselves with over the last fifty thousand years of our sojourn upon the planet. But we did grow, expand, contend, and build magnificent ruins. It was a planet for the taking, and we took it.
We came to recognize a higher power. We called upon Beelzebub, aka the Lord of the Flies, to be placated by our scorched earth offerings and favor our dominion as Lord Man.
We learned to kill megafauna, and pigs and Piggy. We learned to behave evermore badly, to form factions, to justify, to follow self-anointed leaders to war for our own good, to burn the world in service to our short-term self interests. We learned to hate those who wore the wrong color feather in their hair or failed to sing our song, our consensus narrative of true stories.
The lights at night prevent most of us from seeing the Milky Way, elsewhere forests burn, and perhaps the glow will attract the interest of a passerby. Perhaps a Klaatu will appear and we will pause in our endeavors to make reality into an externality. We will anticipate Klaatu's questions. We will wonder at what we are doing and why. For some, there will be tears of recognition.
But don't count on an adult showing up to awaken us from our dogmatic slumbers of righteous certitude. A likely story is that all factions will double down on singing the song of those whose bread they eat until no birds sing.
