Of All the Blessings which to Man

of all the blessings which to man

kind progress doth impart

one stands supreme I mean the animal

without a heart...

that strictly (and how) scientific

land of supernod

where freedom is compulsory

and only man is god.

Without a heart the animal

is very very kind

so kind it wouldn't like a soul

and couldn't use a mind.

-excerpt from "of all the blessings which to man" by E.E Cummings. 

This was written approximately 80 years ago, but I believe it's more valid today than ever. I haven't read this poem in a while, but it popped into my head because I was listening to a podcast earlier this evening and she was discussing hyper-materialists and their disconnection to the "invisible." That even the simple, innate responsibility one can feel for making their community "truly wealthy" she called it, was an invisible force that guided people and couldn't be found in the material. What is true wealth? Some examples include clean water, clean, healthy food that doesn't enslave us to debt and medical corporations, culture, freedom, sovereignty, legacy. 

The over-developed, concrete world is ugly. Its polluted air ages us by weakening our mitochondria. It's largely a complete disregard for the other inhabitants of this world. I used to write about conservation issues, and I remember just bawling my eyes out at some of the injustices I'd read while researching for articles. I once wrote about a proposed lithium battery mine in Nevada and how conservation groups were concerned it would threaten the sagebrush habitat of endangered Pygmy rabbits. They likely would endure major population loss if they lost this habitat. To me they just personified innocence and it really affected me thinking about their whole world crumbling. 

Another podcast I listened to last year had on an Eastern European computer scientist who is convinced (but hopes he's wrong) that AI (or super intelligence as he calls it) will annihilate humanity. At one point in the podcast, he mentioned that an ant colony mound in the middle of a home construction site would just be eliminated - not out of malice, but because they are in the way. In the same token, superintelligent AI might not destroy humanity out of hate, but rather an indifference to our existence. I had to pause the podcast because I was blown away by this statement. I've heard "like attracts like" is a universal law. I'm not sure how to articulate this but take factory farming for instance and the very horrific existence tightly caged animals have in that system. Much of the time they can barely move and that's all they know. Last year I learned something I will never forget. Approximately 7 billion sentient, one-day-old male baby chicks are killed every year around the world by the egg industry (gassed or literally shredded- I screamed when I saw a video of this) because male chicks are useless to them. In the video, they're tossed indifferently from a conveyor belt (alive) down a metal shredder by a worker at the plant at a very fast pace. I am against the system and that's important to differentiate. Bears don't live on leaves. That's not nature. But they also don't have a massive global network of salmon death camps that deny them any semblance of their natural, God-given life, either. 

Paul McCartney said it best. Get back, get back to where you once belonged. I have so much faith that we can get back to who we are, and just to keep it specific to this site, in turn, save ourselves from the explosion of terminal illness and unprecedented chronic health crisis that we are currently facing. In order for us to win, our planet, its inhabitants, has to win. We need to re-connect with the invisible threads that tie us to them.