I Wake Up, and It Breaks My Heart

 

In the morning I open my eyes on this beautiful West Coast world: old growth forest breathing greenly, eagles circling overhead, puffy-cloud blue sky above, and those waves, rolling eternally into shore. The world could not be more beautiful. The world could not be more suffering, and it breaks my heart: forests we need to cool the planet are being clearcut as fast as the temperatures rise, wildfires are burning - again, still, gobbling more trees, miles and miles of trees. Heat domes cover half the country. People are fleeing the flames, leaving their cities. Other places are flooding. And of course, what we don't see on the news, are the animals, starving, displaced, with no where to run, no place safe from human depredation.

I watch the news and it breaks my heart. War, bombing, starving, suffering and dying people, governments so busy talking about war and the level of political threat in the world, no one is paying attention as the planet heats up. Where once we feared reaching 1.5 of global warming, the latest news is governments have moved the goal to 2.0, so they can conveniently continue to deny that we have already passed the tipping point. 

Soon there will be no polar bears, reporters tell us, gazing calmly into the camera. There are 74 orcas left in the southern pod in steadily warming seas, where the salmon they live on have decreased alarmingly. Politicians care more about re-election - and putting party before planet - than they do about whether their constituents will survive into the very near future. We must be the only planet that doesn't address a climate crisis because it isn't economically viable. (The cost of cleaning up after floods, wildfires, tornadoes and extreme climate events is higher, and war is expensive too, but no one is connecting those dots. And the nuclear threat is once again heating up as dictators rattle their sabres and band together.)

Wolves and dogs, my favourite beings on the planet, are suffering in numbers too massive to contemplate, and it breaks my tired old heart.

I was raised to live in hope. I was once full of dreams. I was so positive I annoyed people.  I believed humanity would evolve, there would be a transformation of consciousness. Instead, I see fanatical belief in misinformation and lies,  a global thirst for fascism and more of that horrible old white supremacy we fought against for so long. Human and women's rights that we fought for are being lost. Are we really going to go back and have to fight all those old battles again? Is North America, that fought fascism in World War II, seriously going to become fascist ourselves? (Be careful what you wish for, right-wingers, because you will get a nasty shock under autocratic rule, when democracy is lost.)

In the morning, I open my eyes on this beautiful West Coast world. And it breaks my heart.