Deep Grief

It's hard to describe how yesterday went, but I think the words: pain, anguish, shame, fury, injustice, and immorality come to mind.

The Great Spirit had it so that our outing paused on a Forest Service logging road at the edge of two clear-cuts. One was in the past 3-5 years, the other in the past 7-10. A clear-cut is when a company makes a road into wilderness and uses machinery to chop down every tree (except they usually leave one skinny, weak tree) in an area of hundreds of trees.

The bus didn't start and we spent three hours there, on a road, amidst this devastation. It would be more expensive to take out selected trees and carry them out. But it would keep a healthy and balanced ecosystem. In the long run, more trees would be stronger and the ecosystem would thrive. In the end, the land would be "worth more money" because it would be in better condition. Unfortunately the narrow-mindedness of greed and immediate profit now rapes these landscapes.

Access means that people like us can go out there and hike and explore. It also means that people go to these lands and shoot their guns. They leave hundreds of bullet casings to litter and decimate the lands and also take greedily any animals they see. Or they just shoot for its own sake, bringing out garbage and then taking aim at it... and more litter gets left in the wilderness. And lest we forget that all bullets end up somewhere... usually lodging into some sort of living being. If not, then into our mountain headwaters, polluting the very resource which sustains our life. Violence, pillaging, and cursing future generations in a bastardization, misinterpretation, and immoral declaration of "second amendment rights."

Alcohol bottles, motor oil, car wreckages, sickly native plants, treeless landscapes, barren roads, undrinkable water. "Rights" to use "our" lands, our guns, our freedom... simply bullshit. All of these "rights" are incumbent upon the mandatory obligation and responsibility that goes with them. And it is immoral and dastardly to only consider one side of this coin. Unfortunately that is what we are doing. This is the current state of our land.

We have work to do. We can turn this around. But we have to do the work. Not run away from it. Not pretend it doesn't exist. We must face the grief that we are doing damage to our world. AND we must forgive ourselves for this negligence. Then, we can shift our behaviors to more healthy ones: for ourselves, our land, our freedom, our future, and the future of our generation-to-come. We have the power, but we also have to recognize our dark side.