So here I am, a year later, and now I'm getting ready to be a nomad. How apropo. How better the explore and examine than to actually travel around and meet new people and new cultures. Exciting, stimulating, challenging - all that and more doesn't begin to describe my current emotional landscape. I guess most of all, I feel mad.
My husband and I aren't choosing to be nomads for fun and profit as much as we're choosing it because it looks like society and (everyone's) economy is getting a whole lot worse very quickly. Fortunately, our means of making a living (auto glass repair) doesn't need huge warehouses or masses of personnel. This means that when a bad storm hits, and a whole city needs auto glass right now, we can jump up and be there within a couple days. That kind of agility is going to be increasingly necessary to a lot of people. So, we're now packing our bus, no kidding, getting ready to hit the open road. I sure wish I felt better about it.
I remind myself daily that, as bad as it is for my husband and I, we've been blessed with a lot more than many people in this world have. I really do look around at my mess and sigh, "We're squandering a 1300 square foot, climate-controlled palace more luxurious than many rulers and potentates could have ever dreamed of. Welcome to the 21st Century." We have so many luxuries, it's difficult not to be wasteful. Really. Think of the average sub-Saharan African - they have literally a few gallons of water a day in which to drink, cook, clean, and bathe, and this water is generally hand-carried for a considerable distance. Meanwhile, my bathtub, good old standard-sized suburban America bathtub, takes 70 gallons to fill up. A 5 minute shower with a low-flow showerhead can use as little as 20 gallons of water. How lovely. As little as 20 gallons in 5 minutes. So a 5 minute shower here is a family of 4 Africans eating, cooking, cleaning, and bathing. How many people do you know that actually take a 5 minute shower? A 40 minute shower, rather common, really, that's 160 Africans eating, cooking, cleaning and bathing. Wow. That's a disparity. Yeah, but that's Africa, that's over there, they're poor, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, that's right, Africa is a long ways away, but it isn't never-never land. There's no magical disconnect that keeps stuff that happens in one place from happening in the other. 'What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas' is a good marketing campaign, but it bears no resemblance whatsoever to reality. Reality is, if we don't stop wasting our water here, we are going to be stuck carrying a few gallons of water uphill both ways here, too. This isn't tree-hugging, bush-hippie crap. Anyone can find articles and pictures from all across our nation - massive sinkholes in Florida devouring whole houses; ground subsidence in New Mexico and Arizona causing Monty Python-does-Hades sized cracks to form, 100 feet deep and growing every day, just ridiculous their size; big sections of our national breadbasket is sinking because we're literally sucking the water out of the ground faster than the ground can absorb the rains back in again. So much faster, that we're now beginning to suck polluted, toxic water out of the wells and aquifers because most of the water that's falling onto this parched ground isn't rain, it's runoff from factories and over-fertilized factory farms and over-fertilized suburbia. It's tragic, and it's stupid, and it's totally avoidable, once we pull our collective heads from the sand and start really thinking about our future.
Which brings me back to my original task: examining and exploring our cultures and religions/philosophies. Sure, it's fun to read hoary old tales of biblical superheroes and flying gods have aerial dogfights above the stunned and terrified mortal crowds below. It brings out the kid in me. I love visiting the rituals of other's religions, it's very healing and community-building for me. But all of this feel-good doesn't change this world, right now, unless we choose to stop living in the (admittedly fun) pages of a how-to guide written at least 2,000 years before deep water drilling and genetically modified foodstuffs. Don't get me wrong, I think that if you study enough different religion's texts and ideas and ideals, you'll glean some measure of wisdom and compassion and respect-for-others stuff that most major religions claim they have a monopoly on. However, we need, all of us now, to stop letting a profoundly unscientific set of dogma to continue it's suicidal grip on our scientific policies of today. Exploring religions and philosophies is a fun hobby, but allowing faith and propaganda to replace reason and cooperation is killing everyone. Please, slow down for a minute. Stop. Think. Verify. Counter-Argue. Verify Again. Then Act.
