The Beginning of Change
by Anthony Zebrowski

Every day, we are bombarded with news that the world is closer and closer to the End. Whether it is political, environmental, or just plain old natural disasters, Armageddon is on the tip of everyone's tongues. Terribly enough, what I bring to you today is what is most disturbing, and that is how we have become ambivalent to our own undoing.

There is a fallacy that is being rediscovered every day; a fallacy that once revealed will seem simple, and obvious. Our civilization is based on the fallacy that the earth was created for man, and that it is his destiny to rule.

Our culture, which is 99% of the world population, not only sees and recognizes this fallacy; they live by it as it were some truth, a right in their life. To tell a banker or a pig farmer that this take on the world is detrimental, they will kindly have you escorted out of their office; no silly nonsense today, more rainforests to chop down, more farmland to make, more foreclosures to make, more strip malls to finance.

Naturally, why would anyone want to stop being a god? We have total control (at least it is assumed) of our environment, with the exception of a few earthquakes and floods. We can send messages at the speed of light, and we can buy religion at Barnes and Noble. We can fly to the other side of the world in a few hours; the human potential is limitless, we are more capable than any god has ever been. What the people of our culture have failed to see is that we are not magical like gods, we need the earth and her resources, her power, to wield our magic wands. Irresponsibility, ignorance, and outright arrogance have seen us through to today.

There is a fable that may help exemplify what I am trying to say (excerpted from Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn). Our culture didn't learn how to fly with an understanding of the laws of aerodynamics. They just built contraptions and pushed them off cliffs, and hoped for the best.

Let's suppose that we were aviators, who had just designed a contraption based on avian flight. Everything is ready to go. We're off the edge of the cliff, pedaling like crazy. It's wonderful flying, isn't it? What we don't notice is that we are heading down, fast, at about thirty-two feet per second. As much as our culture would like to think that we are flying, we are violating basic laws of aerodynamics, and culture would tell you, "no, see, my wings are flapping, I'm in the air, I'm flying!"

The ground gets closer, and we just start pedaling harder. NO matter how hard, or how many people pedal, we will never get this craft to stop accelerating towards the earth, not even 6 billion people pedaling will get this craft to go. We are doomed to death, unless we abandon our craft.

Ten thousand years ago, we as a civilization embarked in a similar flight. No theories, we were totally oblivious that there were laws that existed that govern life. We didn't even care; we just want to fly.

Everything was great, at first. We felt the freedoms of air, the freedoms of the biological laws of life. With this freedom came modern-day marvels, like fishnet pantyhose and disco balls and laptops. Lest not to forget Mathematics, urbanization, science and football.

In the contraption, we could have never guessed we weren't in compliance with the laws of aerodynamics. We, after all, in the air, weren't we?

 

Population Control

"Intensification of production to feed a growing population leads to still a greater increase in population" This paradox, as pointed out by Peter Farb, is exactly what the metaphor of our aircraft demonstrated. By ignoring laws of nature, by pedaling fast, we make things worse. Too many people? Just go and put someone peddling for birth control: that should stop it.

The law of the community of life is as simple as this: take what you need, leave everything else. To have everything is to own the world, to be a god. Invariably, every single living creature on this planet follows this law. Trees, coyotes, fish, even sharks. What makes us different is that we eliminate our competition, rather than hunt for what we need.

Eliminating our competition provides us with more resources, thus helping increase food production, thus expanding the population. These resources are killing diversity; they are ending life that has thrived on this planet for billions of years.

The most common of responses lends to our greatest fallacy. Being that "the price that we pay for advancement is the price of pollution."

"Don't worry, we are going to fix that, too, with our infinite wisdom and technology." Two problems have been pointed out, and they come together here. Overpopulation and environmental diversification work together, to destroy the community of life. As we continue to destroy our fellow creature's resources, we make more room for more of us.

What doesn't make sense for some is that how could overproduction cause overpopulation, while millions starve, and some countries are experiencing negative growth. Again, The Great Human Fallacy, the world was made for man, and it is his destiny to rule it, comes into play. We forget one thing, since we are not gods, we are not made of moonbeams and stardust, we are made of food, because we are what we eat, we are essentially food. How could it be conceivable that we could have more people without more food? Until we make people of paper, rocks and scissors, we still play Russian roulette, and our bullet is coming up fast, we gonna die.

Thus, our clearing of resources to make way for only human resources is a violation of the Law of Limited Competition; Take what you want, but leave everything else. Continuing to pedal our wings to the contrary only drags us down faster, and keeps us from thinking of ways to jump out, to build a parachute.

The parachute that I am talking about is a safety device that can get us to the ground safely, without doing further damage, and it give us time to learn to live by the laws of life.

Pedaling is a program, like birth control, and parachuting is a vision. Right now, our vision is to pedal faster, on all sorts of gears (legislation) to fly. To change our vision, we can't simply pedal differently, we need to do something that is working. Parachuting, for now, will get us out of the craft safely. Then, on the ground, we can figure out how we are going to get back up on that cliff, how we are going to fly up there.

I offer my hand and a parachute to everyone. Once we get on level ground, we can begin to find out what works under the laws, and what doesn't.

 

Making a Parachute

You can make a parachute out of anything. You can make it with solar panels and gardens. You can make it with an Indian reservation; there are no limits, just what ever can safely bring you back to the ground. There are people who still do not see the need for parachutes, and others even more skeptical about how to make one. I am trying to say that all you need is vision, and not a diagram, the need for a parachute will create the design. There is no one way to build a parachute and everyone's is going to be different.

 

The Beginning Is Near

There are important problems that we need to build parachutes against. Killing, and lots of it. Kill the killer. Make examples of them all. Gun control, defend the second amendment with your life, beat the issue to death. Abortion is wrong, Abortion is the answer.

These to you now are all obviously pedals, cogs, and chains. They bind us to the machine that is our culture, and we only have two sides. We feel the need to justify and rectify the ends or effects without examining the means, or the cause.

While innocent people by the thousands died to religious intolerance in Serbia, we mourned and was outraged by the deaths of fifteen (The two teenage killers should always be included in this number, so seldom is it done) high school kids sent us into a frenzy, looking for the people who sold them the guns. What will be done in current culture invariably is that we will eliminate further effects. What should be examined here is why? And I can tell you plain as day. As population density increases, the level of aggression increases. We all know this; we have all had unwelcome guests in our house. To the Trench Coat Mafia, these guests had overstayed their welcome. Overcrowding, how can anyone function? It's impossible to think when there is ten different kinds of music blaring in your ear, you feel compelled to find a way to turn it down, by what mean given to you.

What could have ever prompted the invention of a highly inaccurate firearm? Ease of use, simple and quick death. The handgun is another defiance of the gods. We now can much more readily decide who live or dies, and all we can up with is rights and responsibilities. Our lawmakers refuse to examine why we feel the need for handguns. Abortion is touchy, but again, the same problem and question comes up. Why don't we figure out why we need abortion, and eliminate the cause?

I can answer these questions, easy as pie. Ever been to some type of humanitarian office where there was a plaque, "Our business to put ourselves out of business!" With an exclamation point, little heart for the period, because they care. Never in the history of mankind has a politician ever hung such a plaque over there heads, because it is inconceivable: A, to fix humanity (in their point of view), and B, they see government as necessary.

If there were someone interested in changing the world, earnestly, they don't run for public office, they teach and change consciousness, they are the MLKs and Ghandis, they are the B's. We are the B's.

The people of this need to wake up, we need to listen to Mother Nature, not Mother Culture. We humans need to stop waiting for someone to change the world. For those of you who were going to wait until someone was going to act, you vacation has been called off early, it's time do something. We are out of excuses, and can no longer be numb.

We have been led to think that we would need a factory to weave our parachutes, but there was a time when everyone wove for him or herself, and today is the day we begin again.