Are we the dumbest people ever?

And this year’s Darwin Award goes to …. the human race.

The Darwin Awards are for people who have improved the gene pool by removing themselves from it, often in spectacular ways. But as I write this, to my surprise, I discover the Darwin Awards website is considering  “honoring the human race with a pre-posthumous Darwin Award for their failure to comprehend the gravity of their planetary abuse”.

The music of my youth accompanies this post with the warnings those brilliant young musicians produced for us. Yes Bob, a hard rain is falling.

Come gather ’round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’. (Bob Dylan)

In the past we have done some stupid things. In Europe, a standard medical treatment was blood letting. And all of us, in every corner of the planet have ancestors who have killed other people in hideous ways for the most puerile reasons.

Who are these men of lust, greed, and glory?
Rip off the masks and let see
But that’s no right oh no, what’s the story?
But there’s you and there’s me.

These lyrics are by Richard Davies and Roger Hodgson of Supertramp, from the Crime of the Century album.

Take Joan of Arc. The English burnt to death this young heroic 19 year-old French warrior. We are not doing that to Greta Thunberg. We are not that barbaric. We are just burning and eroding the planet from under her and denying her a future. And the vitriol and abuse she suffers by men who will not achieve in their lifetimes, let alone sixteen years, a fraction of what she has achieved .  Charles Eisenstein points to a deeper yearning in young people that transcends the climate crisis.

 The climate issue is, rather, the vehicle for the expression of a deeper yearning. Greta Thunberg and the climate strikers embody a refusal to comply with a system that is anti-life. “I will not go to school. I will not participate in this. I want no part of the program.”

Fair enough!

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’ (Bob Dylan)

The sad thing is that we think we are so smart. Edward deBono likened the intellect to the engine of a car, and the mind, the driver. There are some very big engines out there and some not so good drivers. We have become captured by our own creations. Don’t fret about killer robots, the constructions in our minds are far more dangerous. As Clifford Gertz writes “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun”.

We laud our democracies. But look at singed Australia. Government led climate action is hobbled on the right by coal money and hobbled on the left by coal unions. Don’t start me on the U.S. Listen to Bob instead.

Come senators, congressmen please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’ (Bob Dylan)

I don’t know if this rant has made me feel any better. I think I will go back to the book I am browsing – Building a Better World in Your Backyard Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys.

An now some music.

And from Wellington, Ruth Mundy. Listen to the lyrics please.