The Big Bang and all the little ones

“As the world’s resources of non-renewable fuels – coal, oil, and gas – are exceedingly unevenly distributed over the globe and undoubtedly limited in quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an ever-increasing rate is an act of violence against nature, which must inevitably lead to violence between men.”
- E.F. Schumacher
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Nothing makes sense. And everything does. This morning I watched a documentary called “Why We Fight.” I think why we fight is the exact reason the government is often willing to tell us – “to protect the American way of life.” The life I live. The life I can’t see a way out of.
In a nutshell, our way of living is dependent, totally, on the availability of oil. The global economy would not exist without it. And in order to keep it running smoothly, oil must be coming in regularly, at stable prices. This is a game with very high stakes, and especially for the U.S. as the world’s biggest consumer of oil. We are fighting over oil because we want things to stay the way they are. We are used to it.

I feel stuck. I feel like everything I try to do amounts to spooning water out of the ocean. I try to walk. I shop at farmer’s markets. I keep giving things to Valu-Village, trying to re-define for myself how many possessions I actually need to cart around this earth. I dabble in the art of making things, baking bread, braiding friendship bracelets. And yet. This morning I put bread in an electric toaster from out of a plastic bag. Bread made in a factory and trucked to the store that I drove to in order to buy it. I made tea in the microwave. I watched a DVD, sitting on plush carpet, surrounded by latex-painted walls. I took a shower with water heated by electricity. I squirted things made from various chemicals out of various plastic bottles and put them on my skin. I dressed in factory-made clothing. A T-shirt from Mexico. A jacket from Sri Lanka. Everything I buy, no matter how local, was driven some distance in some kind of oil-using vehicle. This is life, and most of the time we don’t even think about it. I don’t often remember that nothing was like this even two hundred years ago. Two hundred years. And for hundreds of thousands of years, homo sapiens have been living without oil and industrialization. For thousands of years, civilizations have developed and disappeared without it. And so I think that the “American way of life” has nothing at all to do with what it really means to be human, to be the size of a human, so much bigger than microbes and atoms, so much smaller than stars and galaxies and even trees, so much cleverer than other animals, so much more confused. Shouldn’t being human come before being American? Shouldn’t we be more concerned with finding our place in this very old place called earth than our place in this very new, humanly-created global economy? The tower of babel has been built, and we all rent rooms in it. Have we forgotten the basic truths, that everything built falls down, everything that begins will end, everything born will die. The nature of reality is change. We try so hard to keep things as they are, try to forbid all changes except those we have decided are “good” – by which we mean, those that are in line with what we desire, what we have learned to desire. But the universe is not at our beck and call. The tides come in, the seasons change, rain falls, lightning strikes. Stars nova. Comets fly. Gravity pulls. Space and time and matter do what they do, without us. We are small. We are not in control. Have we forgotten?