The Times We're Living IOn

The Times We’re Living In
Will Shonbrun


What I’d like to know is how to live in this time and place in our country? What to do or not do? How to be? What’s of value or not? What needs to change? Like uninvited guests these are the questions I wake up to each and every day, as I imagine so do many others.

I know that the world I live in, this planet, is in the beginning throes of climate and weather changes that happen very infrequently as far as humans have been able to ascertain. Geologically those changes have been marked, significant to the degree there are regions of our planet that have recorded them to be read by science. Biological/organic life dates back to a 3.5 to 4.5 billion years range. The results of previous massive climate changes, extinctions of plant and animal species, gross changes in regional environments are there for science to read and analyze; writings on the wall so to speak.

We are now at the dawn of another of these monumental, all encompassing changes in the climate of this planet, our environment, and what that will mean for all life on Earth is not fully known. Environmental regions – rain forests, deserts, polar caps, tropics and coastal areas – will change as warming progresses and increases in these cycles. We know the oceans are getting warmer and are expanding and we can only speculate what the affects of all this will have on plant and animal life. What there is simply no question about is that this is happening and the changes will be profound.

Not only is our own environment turning on us, as it seems, threatening us with nothing less than extinction, our 236-year-old form of government, our political system, is being challenged on its central basis: the rule of law. We have now all been introduced to what a society would look like if all its rules were arbitrary and the rules don’t apply to everyone equally. In fact the political game that is now being played out is one of constant change – principles, rules, mores – and the result of this is that in such a morass truth dies.

When the truth dies it takes everything with it: justice, knowledge, the social contract, and the endeavor to improve the human condition. When truth dies, chaos reigns and destruction flourishes. A society that abandons truth welcomes insanity. It’s happened in human history. It should come as no surprise.

This is the time we are living in. We’ve fucked with nature and nature is letting us have it back one thousand fold. We stand on the brink of losing the foundation of our Constitutional system in trade for … what? The whims of a half-sane mega narcissist who would run this country as a dictatorship?

We are in the time of two existential crises that will set the course for human history. This is about as crunch-time as it gets.

I don’t know about you-all, but I got some questions that need some splainin’.

I appreciate the questions that Will poses in his first paragraph below. Unless we deal with these vital issues we humans may soon be toast. Will Shonbrun has been an excellent writer for many years. Among his writing are books and articles in magazines, which you could find out more about by a google check. I hope that he will continue to bring his good writing to Waccobb.net.