Like Paper in Fire

I've been going through my CD collection lately and also soliciting suggestions from friends about songs that can be used as sources of inspiration for meditation and ritual. I received back quite a number of great ideas (thanks, AODA Public friends!) and have begun to comb through them. But this morning, while going through the music I already have, I came across this old favorite: Paper in Fire, by John Mellencamp. The verse that really struck me today was this one:

"There's a good life
right across the green fields
And each generation
Stares at it from afar
But we keep no check
On our appetites
So the green fields turn to brown
Like paper in fire"

I couldn't sleep this morning, so I got up for a while around 3am. During that time I read some of the online blogs I occasionally visit. One of them, The Automatic Earth had a guest article from a young man living in Kenya, who wants to know what is going to happen to his generation and the generations that come after now that we, the elders of our time, have incurred debt unimaginable, as well as burned through the majority of the "easy oil" on the planet and have used it to joyride in personal automobiles, wage war all over the globe, make stupid throwaway trinkets out of plastic, and pile all the residue and packaging from our excesses up in gargantuan landfills on the land and continental size "garbage gyres" in the sea. As painful as it may be to examine our own culpability here, well - I believe he has the right to ask. I just wish we had a good answer for him.

The bottom line is - "we kept no check on our appetites." For all our vaunted human brainpower, for all our supposed ability to reason beyond the moment - we chose to behave no differently than the simplest of single cell creatures. We behaved just like yeast do when given a rich environment. We used the easy energy to grow fat, procreate like mad, and then, in true yeasty fashion, to piss in our own nests. We gave no serious thought to the future, to what our children or grandchildren would need to live healthy and happy lives. We set up an economic system that rewarded our own short-sighted greed and pushed the payment for it upon the next generations. We, the generations who unlocked the potential behind the "black gold" from the ancient past have partied hearty on our inheritance and have refused to acknowledge that we are just as bound by limits as any other lifeform on this planet. We refused to keep a check on our appetites so that future generations could make use of this wonderful legacy of millions of years of fossilized sunlight. We chose instead to blow the vast majority of it on one continuous drunken binge - the energy that took geologic ages to accumulate and concentrate will be effectively gone within 100 or so years of its debut. Within just one human lifetime, give or take a decade or two, we blew an inheritance that could have lifted not just one, but many generations of our kind out of abject poverty, pain and despair. All that will be left to show for the party is a mountain of debt and a planet full of trash and poison.

We could stop squandering what we have now and save at least some of this bounty for future generations, but most of us are too selfish, shortsighted or ignorant to make the sacrifices required. We would rather pretend that the limits do not exist, or that somehow our super brains will figure out a way to make them not count. And we will do this right up until the end. And what we will leave for our children and their children will not be pretty or healthy. They will live their lives in the stinking mess that we've created. And they will be the ones that pay for what we, their parents and grandparents, have done.

Kids, I'm truly sorry for my part in this, but I don't quite know how to stop. I guess it's time to put some serious effort into figuring that out.