Yet another old essay I couldn't get published...

In Defense of (Just) Being

By D. H. Garrett

“We need to move beyond the Christian fantasy that we are a completely good and benign presence on the planet, that we are somehow God’s chosen species, with a free pass to do whatever we want, regardless of the consequences.  We should think about how we can be less ego-centric, and seek to balance our technological advances with tending to the well-being of the earth, other cultures, and one another. We should consider how to create more happiness and harmony in the world, and a little less profit.”

                                                                        Salvatore Folisi “Eros Over Logos”

            I am a poet because they are short (the poems that is: the stature of poets as they extend into the metaphysical and metaphorical realms, is no doubt, immeasurable).  Frankly, the only long form I have any enthusiasm for these days is making love, though my wife of course from time to time may beg to differ.   You might say that I, and my fellow artists, bohemians, whathaveyou and many of the downright impoverished (by a measurement we reject) who make up most of the world’s humanity, are all lost to the great engine-ing maws of capitalism and corporatism: the so-called marketplace, that abattoir of the natural, and human world.  Yes, we are lost: lost in being: lost to being.  As such, because life buzzes around us and within us and every form and misshapen lumpen proletariat fashion and passion has for us its own particular -no ticket required- beauty, being lost in being (which is what all that pursuit of happiness nonsense is really about) means we have no particular need of finding a way out.  I am not romanticising poverty: give us please our daily bread and a roof over our heads for the worst of storms.  But a leak from time to time, and a little candlelight, is not the end of the world, it can instead be the beginning of intimacy: and intimacy is what we crave, not Facebook, not Twitter, but touch and friendship. 

            In contradistinction to that, I offer up, the Lhasa Mall.  Despite it being a World Heritage site, certain Chinese businesspeople are tearing down what is left of a Civilization of the Heart and of the Mind, and replacing it with yet another gorgeous (no doubt) Cathedral of Consumerism.  http://highpeakspureearth.com/2013/our-lhasa-is-on-the-verge-of-destruction-please-save-lhasa-by-woeser/ I do not hate the Chinese for that. They are human.  They have drunk the kool-aide of the American Dream as portrayed to them by its merchants of illusion, and not stopped to ask, what the real price is.   As an American, even a green-spieling, mediocrely poetic, laid-off-for-honesty diplomat, and perpetually lapsing Tibetan Buddhist, I really have no right to tell them, or anyone, to stop.  Their military, political and economic power was built one Chinese-made cheap discount item at a time, all willingly bought by us, no thought of anything (like saving the planet or saving a civilization or preventing near to slave labor in far away factories) except saving money.  And we, defenders of liberty and freedom, have so conveniently forgotten that we took away our own continent’s natural resources and committed genocide on its peoples, all in following our 3 in 1 God of Economic Progress, American Exceptionalism, and that weirdly off-brand militaristic version of Constantinian Christianity that has proved so useful for the aggrandizement of state power everywhere.  So really, I have no right to say anything to the Chinese.  A quarter at least of their entire economy is export driven, and that’s mostly our junk they are making.  As such, Tibet’s ecological demise is quite significantly, also, American driven (question: which country has in terms of total accumulated levels spewed the most greenhouse gasses into the global commons of the atmosphere? And which country is it, that, its politicians bought and paid for by the worst polluters themselves, refuses to face up to climate reality and its responsibilities to solve the above?).   Could it be the land of the no free lunch and the home of the brave if armed to the teeth?

            But I cry.  The loss of this beauty, this holiness, this simplicity, this right livelihood, to the global corporate agenda in its Chinese incarnation, is a tragedy, that I -dreamer of clear skies, and clean water, and of an earth abundant with fellow non-human but still our family, travellers- cannot help but grieve for.  But maybe this is the problem.  Who stands for us, who are content with birds and clouds, flowers and clean air?  We have no armies massed to defend us.  We have our songs and our bodies, our poetic pleas and the joy in our eyes which we would gladly share if anyone would listen.   Who speaks for the earth?  Where is the Earth’s Department of Homeland Security?  There is a village in Bhutan that has foregone electricity because they do not want to disturb the black-necked cranes that nest there in the Spring.  But we, we worship a different sort of crane, and have come to believe we are not part of the earth.  Even now, in the midst of committing the great ecocidal, terracidal, act that we now are perpetrating, and have been perpetrating in wave after wave for some time, we think somehow we will remain safe, cocooned before our TV screens or prostrating in our malls, from the consequences.   We have forgotten, that the forests, the mountains, the rivers the oceans, the prairies: these are our livers, our lymph nodes, our kidneys, our stomachs, our heart, and yes, if we would but listen, these are part of our own minds, our innermost sanctum of sanctums, or what is best of it.  

            We are now so deep into cannibalizing our own, -the earth system’s- organs of sustainability that earth system failure has begun.  Make no mistake about it, though the titans of industry may say, that we stand upon their giant shoulders, they in term stand upon the humble earth, and are crushing it.  The Chinese too will wake up one day to what they have done, and grieve.  What’s that Joni Mitchel song, “Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you’ve got till its gone…”   Well they’re tearing down (and we in lock-step with them) one of the mystic hearts of the planet, and are putting up a shopping mall. Perhaps it is time to do something radical, to undertake a Lysistrata movement against consumerism.  Let us shake the corporate colonizers of our minds to their core: let us get to know our neighbors, let’s walk in the park, take a day off from work and play with our children, share our jobs with someone, live on less but have more time, begin to reconnect with whatever animals and plants may be around us, forgo the binge shopping at Walmart and Costco.  Let us begin to dream about winning the Lottery of Love, aspire to be a Bill Gates of Friendship, try to win the Noble Prize in Economic Kindness.  Let us help to build a society in which the richest man or woman is the one who has the most real friends and has done the most good for the most people, and who has learned the best to live with the earth, and not at the earth’s expense, and at the expense of those of humanity least able to defend themselves, because they haven’t the money to buy the lawyers and politicians needed.  

            So I guess that brings us back to us, the poor, really only in so far as we are lacking the instruments that are destroying life on earth; the lazy, only in so far as me manage our time better, saving it as we can for more important things.  Yes, though we are down and out, and some of us even have gone to seed, we are not downcast: we have been cast up instead upon strange and lovely shores, where time itself is sipped, at a more leisurely pace, one might even say, it is better enjoyed that way.  We let instead each day tell its story at that day’s pace though it take all night. And if a moment should find cause to stay, why, we welcome it, understanding the need to pause from all the fury and the wars. Ask yourself if all your riches measure up even unto one whorl of hair on the head of a laughing child.  Being is mother’s milk.  It is not so much that I pity those who, having been unnecessarily weaned for some version of Nestlé’s fake milk scheme, then go reeling mindlessly from pixel-formed desire to pixelated pseudo-satiety, when all along Being is free for the taking.  It is that in the craven sickness of their reeling madly about for what they don't even know they have lost, they are killing our mother, and howling to make even more profit from her death.  Let us rise to protect our mother.  The GDP of real happiness has abundance enough to feed us all.

Authors Note: Daniel Garrett is a former U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Officer who has fallen from the heights of diplomacy into unemployment and in doing so has happily refound the earth.  DISCLAIMER:  The views expressed herein are solely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of State or the U.S. Government.