Think on it

11/26/23

I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood that is now an Indian neighborhood. It's a small enclave that is sandwiched between Skokie (famous for the mini-series about the Nazis marching where a bunch of Jewish people and holocaust survivors lived)and West Rodgers Park, a northwestern area of Chicago. Across the street from our townhouse complex on the residential street was a park, and across the main road was a Bell and Howell factory.

I was a little kid when we lived there. We moved by the time I was exiting 3rd grade. An early and clear memory has haunted me throughout my life. It was before my brother was born or soon after, so I had to be about 3 years old. At the park, I was staring at the smoke stacks spewing noxious fumes into the sky. I asked my mother, "Isn't that bad for the air?"

"Oh, no," she said, "the air cleanses it."

"How does it do that, and where does all the smoke go?" I asked. I was a very obnoxious kid with too many questions.

"It dissipates in the air. The earth is a big place," she said.

It still made no sense to me. I thought the earth may be gigantic, but this was not logical. I pondered it over for years and years. I have returned to this memory when people deny our part in destroying the world's ecosystems. No matter how big a room is, if you keep putting garbage in it, eventually, it will be overrun with trash. There is no magic in the air. The chemicals spewed out in smoke stacks don't magically dissipate; they fall back to the earth and contaminate the soil and the air. As anyone who lived in Chicago in the 1970s could attest, you could smell Gary, Indiana, across the lake on windy days. Gary was a steel town, an unbearable cloud of noxious gases and shift horns blaring.

It was clear to me from then on that all of this would reach critical mass at some point. If you paid attention, there were always stories of polluted waters, chemical spills, and containments in the soil. Whole species have been going extinct since the start of the Industrial Revolution. This trend has only accelerated every year I have been on this planet. We all know this, right? I live in the same world as everyone else, but you would be amazed at how many times I have heard people try to extinguish this reality with magical thinking.

One of my first experiences with this was in 1987 when I conversed with a good friend of mine ten years my senior. We were talking about climate change (then called global warming) and pollution and how we were going to kill this planet if we continued to keep doing what we were doing.

He said to me, "Oh, Denise…" In his mansplaining way, like, aren't you cute? Don't worry; you're pretty little head about those big things. "Mother Earth will be fine. It's arrogant to think we could do anything to kill her."

I said, "Arrogant? Cancer is a small thing that starts out with just one cell. It spreads and proliferates until it kills its host. It's arrogant to think we use and abuse all her resources, contaminate everything we touch, and expect everything to be OK."

He would not argue that case now. He likely doesn't even remember saying this or ever feeling that way.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, my husband watched "American Buffalo" by Ken Burns. I was doing other things while it was on, but the most compelling thing I took away from the series was that the buffalo were partially saved from extinction by some of the same people who hunted them to near extinction. The charge was primarily headed by hunting groups and some conservationists. The mass slaughter of the buffalo had been a strategy to starve the native people in our government's genocide against them. Later, when Teddy Roosevelt wanted to hunt one, there weren't any to kill. A public relations campaign started. They were put in zoos, and a herd went on the road. People in America fell in love with them and were made to see them as an essential part of the American landscape, and then voila, they went on to proliferate through wealthy people who allowed them to graze on their properties. There were also schemes to turn them into a new type of cow. Fantasies of becoming wealthy through the domestication of the buffalo drove the other segment of those who made it their mission to repopulate them. The moral of this tale is that it wasn't altruism or doing what was right that motivated our fellow man to save this creature whom they had all but extinguished from the face of the earth; no, it was greed.

So, I guess greed is good after all.

The billion plutocratic class is in a personal space race to see who can build a better rocket into outer space. You don't think that's a coincidence, do you?

No, again, self-preservation and greed are at the root of innovation.

We once lived in collective tribal societies where cooperation and sharing were critical to survival. The last batch of people who lived culturally like this were the native Americans, who were victims of genocide and later destroyed culturally because collectivism was offensive to the white man's god. Or, more accurately, it was inconvenient for those who wanted to buy, sell, and steal what the native people possessed, and god was a great cover. In fact, god is often a cover for greed, selfishness, intolerance, hate, murder, and corruption. It is hard to argue with a wolf wearing a papal gown or a panther who proclaims himself a prophet. We are wired to follow other people's lead. This is how we survived in groups.

Western culture has reversed this instinct, yet the instinct survives in dark places and hard truths. We emphasize the individual, pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps. The problem with this is one must-have boots and bootstraps to pull oneself up with. We must remember that the boots were made by someone else, as were the bootstraps. We must not forget that our food is grown by others. We must remember that impoverished people make our clothes in faraway countries. We forget everything; everyone is interconnected, and no one does anything alone. No one ever pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps. It is a literal impossibility. We are born from our mother's womb, nursed, and educated to fit into a culture filled with ideas and misunderstandings. We follow our parents and their leadership, then our bosses and presidents.

We live in a nation of laws and rules that are not always right or moral but are made by other human beings to mitigate the wicked among us. These laws are instituted to control the poor and vulnerable and keep people in their lanes and classes. There is no such thing as a "self-made" millionaire. One can not create wealth alone. Wherever there is a "self-made" millionaire, hundreds if not thousands of people contribute to that individual's company, contributing financially, through labor or innovations, intellectually, through adoption and critique. All of those individuals make a company, idea, or invention workable, commercially successful, or viable.

Nothing is built alone, ever. Even a great work of art is built on the backs of all the work done by artists in a long succession of ideas, techniques, and theories. Humanity is a collective organism with individual cells.

"Self-made" is a lie the greedy tell themselves to give themselves permission to use and abuse more than their fair share. Gumption and leadership, sure, but "self-made" is a fairy tale, an impossibility. It is a lie our culture has perpetrated to create our own class of oligarchs, a new type of monarchy and class system.