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GENERAL DEDICATION:
To The Greening Generation,
who have inherited our graying world
to whom we leave the enormous challenge
of returning nature to its primal blush of green
in the face of swelling corporations and civilizations
rushing forward at a lethal pace.
Somehow they, and we, must help
transform our energy and material uses
into a high clean tech that harmonizes
with the grass and the trees
the rivers and the seas
and the air we breath.
If they fail, we fail
and much of life fails.
CHAPTERS
Prologue
A Moment in the Present
The Golden Glow
The Silver Shadow
The Great White Out
The Green Hope
Afterlog
BRIDGE OUT: FULL SPEED AHEAD!
The boat drifts calmly
Moonlight ripples the water
Dreamers sleep
Waterfall.
Forty yards away, wet death yawns
Father forgive the dreamers
They knew not what they did
The giant car hums smoothly
Headlights swallow the asphalt
Passengers doze in oblivion
Bridge Out
Forty yards or years away, steel death gapes
Father forgive the car’s creators
They knew not what they did
Father easy on the passengers
Drugged and drowsy of what they do
Father damn the drivers
Full knowing where they go
Father damn us all if we don’t find out.
To know
To know the cosmic bookends
and the human constructs
To know how we got here
where we are going
To hope
To hope we can change
To act
To act not only for food drink shelter and sex
but to act against custom and comfort
against the inertia of culture
To know, to hope, to act
Or to drive
Full speed ahead: bridge out
Prologue
I have hurt our earth. As my knowledge increases, I am still doing harm. It is easy to point my blaming finger at the giant grip of culture in which I am helpless, so why not succumb to its seductively comfortable grasp? A grasp I know will become a crushing caress, which I might escape, but not my children.
Yet how can I surrender when that same giant hand that holds me smashes down like a fist on my sleeping mother? I am in that fist; I am a part of that fist.
Escaping that clasp seems impossible. Even if I could slip under a crease in those huge fingers, and if I could shed my clothes and run from house and car, where would I run to? The woods are almost gone that once might have held a few escapees.
No, I can’t run, and you can’t either.
We are caught in culture.
If we were born in a brothel, a ghetto, a barrio, a shack or a slum, we could step out of it because there is a place to step to. But we can’t leave our technological chemical culture because it covers the earth. Somehow, smothering in these seemingly soft folds of protection, we must open the massive fist from within and change its very nature.
That is the quest of this book. I reach out to you for help. Please hold my hand, pardon my outbursts, and steady my footsteps. We all walk this planet together.
How did we catch ourselves in our own grasp? We did most of it in the last few generations. Although civilization was long in the making, and our species had eaten up many of the forests of the world, suddenly, recently, the mechanized, chemical assault became rapidly global. Largely started by our grandparents, increased by our parents, the destruction has run amuck by us—much of which was done without thinking.
History will absolve our fathers and mothers, for they knew not what they did. Their world exploded under their probing hands into this technological marvel/monster that glistens and shines like the sirens of old, while our air and our water grow sick.
From this point forward, history will not absolve any of us, because we know what we do. But there are ways to wheel our massive cultural inertia around. When we leave this planet in guilt or innocence, what will be the state of the earth that we pass to our children? It will be their greatest challenge--to save their planet, to save its life, to save themselves.
You could call this book a generational cultural biography of the road taken, not chosen.
Our parents sped along this road, ignorant of the broken bridge ahead. They had fled the golden glow of farmutopia, entered the silver shadow of Pandora’s Shop, and birthed us among her mechanical and electrical toys—and now we wander in this great white out, with an intellectual awareness of the problem, but with an apathetic blindness to the solution. And what do we pass onto our children who are our green hope?
While the above color-coded structure is hopefully chronologically clear and analogically appealing, don’t let the style fool you--I promise a rollicking, ironic, sardonic, sarcastic, humorous ride with flashbacks and fast forwards that might spin out of control. Hang on.
I throw this book in your face!
I apologize for not properly throwing my gauntlet to the ground, but I wanted to shock—to shock myself out of my comfortably lethargy, and to shock you, along with me, so we can do something about our cultural projectory. If you are still reading, you just might have the gumption (or the digestive system of a goat) to finish this book.
I can throw the book, because it is not the biblical stone that comes with conditions about who is allowed to cast it first. Certainly that wouldn’t be me, for I am with guilt--which would disqualify me from hurling anything. But I will hurl anyway--I will throw a lot of oaths at a lot of oafs, including myself.
I write for you, I write for our children. I write to crack this cultural bind that holds you, holds me. I write for our world.
If these struggling words work for you, I share them gladly. If they don't, please formulate your own; for if our words, or another's do not work soon, death by stoning would be a classy way to exit.
I lash out particularly at those who know and still destroy. To these, who are the cancers in our civilization, I have honed my words into caustic ridicule.
I also lash myself, (quite lightly, barely breaking the skin, I admit) to do what I now know I must do. I hurl at myself. I beat my head with my book trying to wake and shake myself out of a lethal lethargy, to coax, curse, cajole--and if I could, coerce myself into action to break free, to begin to heal, to begin to do what I know I should do.
And as I lash myself, I laugh. It hurts less that way. Laughter can heal as it cuts. And I am having fun in the writing, and I wish you so in the reading.
If you still hold this book, you have picked up the gauntlet. You must now read. Or be called a coward. (Because I might have angered you, I have requested anonymity from the publisher. Please address all heated correspondence and suspicious packages to Coward / Cobarde / Couard / Angsthase).
So as I throw this book in your face, and into my own, go ahead, curse with me, laugh with me, and then begin the cure—to know, to hope, and then to do.
Author’s Disclaimer
This book is honest. I swear to that, and I am honest.
There. If I’m not lying, that’s all you need to know. You do, however, have to figure out when I am being humorous, ironic, satirical, salacious, shallow, insulting, or unintentionally arrogant.
I played the game of being a scholar for six years, the dissertation of which now blocks the dust from a shelf at Northwestern. Compared to the knowledge of the scientists, historians, environmentalists, sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, and my kids, this book sucks—hey guys, I'm just a Johnny-green-come-lately English teacher with nothing better to do with my summer than vent. The venting is a stream of semi-consciousness (emphasis on the semi) with the faucet stuck open.
Though I have not put anything into this book, which I do not believe to be true, please check any fact in this book before going to the wall with it. I'm kinda lazy, and I don't have a bevy of beautiful research assistants to, well, vet my facts. But I did check all my uncertainties at least once, and I paid attention to the reputability of the source; but being lazy and not liking bibliographical documentation, I have not usually told you where I found it. Google anything you don’t believe, like the first internal combustion car being a hydrogen car; and if you do check up on me, I'm kinda biased toward looking for that .edu on the end of the URL. Not that there aren't liars among us teachers, but most of us don’t teach for the money and we are not influential enough to be paid to falsify a position.
Will someone please tempt me? And make it big. I want to find my breaking point.
Foreword
Okay. So I already had my opening shot with the Prologue. What gives with a Foreword? I am quite chronologically correct, for prologue is of Greek/Latin origin and thus precedes foreword which is of Anglo/Saxon origin. So cut my double-dipping a break.
“Who's to bless and who's to blame?"
We’ll answer that question in four generations—and most of us are in the last two of those generations.
But a more important question looms: into what hell (or heaven) are we hurtling? That hell is physically forming into clear, geological/cultural markers. Read the sign: Bridge out, full speed ahead.
And the most important question: can we turn this massive cultural machine around? And if we can, will we?
We had it.
We lost it.
Our days are not as good as the good old days. And yes, I know that most generations look back to their youth as the good days. So, probably they were never that good and they really weren’t that old and far away either.
Not long ago we had it. Yet we lost it. We lost the touch of eden, the fresh earth when it blushed sky blue in purity, and pine green in virginity. Sure, the sky still seems blue (if you are not looking from a distance horizontally into that slice of sickness that hangs over most of our cities). And the sky still seems clear at night (if you are not trying to count to 5,000, the approximate number of stars up to magnitude 6 which were once visible to your eyes, and many of which are now blotted by the thick offal in our air). And yes, the earth still seems green--witness the single crop of corn ringing the suburbs ringing the cities. With stars winking out in the skies, and corn usurping flora in the fields, we are on a geometrically eroding progression.
Can we regain it?
No. Never like it was. But can we try to stop the erosion? Alone, we can’t--like one person pushing against the giant car containing civilization, it would be useless. Alone we might push and die with a clean conscience only to be swatted like a fly on the windshield.
But together, maybe we can begin to slow the massive inertia of the huge wheels. Since our recent family line set this machine in motion, since we empower it now, theoretically we can slow it, stop it, or guide it. It is doable, but damnably difficult (my daughter hates my alliteration—so if you have her mindset, and I wouldn’t mind having her mind, I apologize--I’m so seriously sorry for this sibilance).
Europe was the first to let the monster out of its coal mines and into their factories, from the looms in their parlors into Cartwright’s powered looms. America adopted the monster, fed its fire-bellied furnaces, gave it full legal rights, and then ran wild with it. As the greatest polluter per person, America must now lead the way out of the miasma, back into earth health. It is that--or die as a civilization. I say that not as an alarmist, but simply as a man who has lived and watched the earth change, who has seen the clear creeks of his youth buried under suburbs, who has stood on Montana’s glaciers that are now gone, and who has read barely enough science and history to understand the recent impact on our old earth.
Science is the tool in the wings of the dove and the fangs of the snake, in the hands of the father and mother monster which is in us all. And we know how to use that same tool of science to tame the belching, ripping, tearing monster turned loose on the planet, but we do not have the urgency, and therefore do not have the political will to do so.
The monster lies not in science, nor in the giant machine caroming recklessly forward; the monster lies in us, in our unreflecting, greedy selves.
Uh oh. That means changing something. Like dieting, or quitting smoking. Hard. But after dropping that hanging adipose, or breaking that chain of smoking, don’t you feel better? A hard change can be a healthy change—and worth it.
So change. If not for yourself, then for your children--or favorite niece or nephew or some young person, who might be at your dying bedside, and who you hope will be gentle with you, and remember you for a while. For those people, if not for yourself, please change. Change first your own living style. Secondly, change your culture.
Apologies to literati for rambling like Rabelais, for failing the pen of Voltaire while swearing like a sailor-- and therefore, apologies to my mother tongue. If you find all 103 non-sequiturs, I will give you a free book. While counting, do not include the sick segues because literary sickness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder: if you find a sick segue, suspect the source.
A Moment in the Present
This is my world. This is your world. This is my story. This is your story.
Buried so deep within us that we cannot touch them, unknown drives and forces from evolutionary time come burbling and floating, swimming and scuttling, crawling and climbing, and walking forth. We have stepped out of nature in the feet of our ancestors only a few short seconds ago, and we changed the earth.
Most of that terraforming can be seen in the four parts of my story--and those same parts in your story. I think we have a few pangs of conscience and some huge healing we need to do. We will meet that challenge in The Great White Out, of our story. You can help me to write that part when we get there. In fact, like it or not, you must help me write that one. You'll understand later.
I tried to fictionalize our story for you, but I failed. Fiction has a way of letting the truth slip out: after all, truth will out was first uttered in fiction. I'm afraid this book holds far too much truth for many of us to look in the face, to reject much of what we have accepted as true and good, namely, our culture, because we grew up in it, comfy, fed, and fat. I certainly did, and the effort to turn my head around and see otherwise is Plato’s challenge in his cave. Please try to see and accept and change with me.
This book is real. Raw real. Blood dripping, rust-covered, brightest-smile-on-a-child's-face real. To find the real you only have to double the hyperbole, sharpen the sarcasm, hypo-freeze the satire, and hype the humor by powers of ten. Laugh. Laugh with me. Laugh at me. And laugh at the Exxon Execs. You'll be happier that way, and your life-sentence will feel shorter.
I said I was afraid. Intellectually I fear; emotionally I hope. I choose emotions over reason--a rational choice. If that seems contradictory to you, it is. It is the paradox we live in.
We are crucified on this cross of contradiction, called civilization.
With our hands nailed we must break free. And biased though it may be, I choose the emotionally positive as I spin our story. (Am I letting fiction slip into this truth?) I must choose the emotionally positive, for I must have hope in my story and hope in yours. You see, we read our past, and from it we choose to live or die.
Correction—we die whatsoever we choose. All do. But how will we die? That is the question.
And how do we feel about ourselves when we go screaming or smiling above the pain and fear of passing into the unknowing? That too is the question.
And how soon? Another question.
And whom do we drag with us? Our children?
But screw this dying stuff—the bigger question is: How do we live? And what do we leave behind?
Okay, two questions in one, but so related in cause and effect that we can call them one. After all, how we live is what we leave behind.
And Shakespeare notwithstanding--that is the question.
How do we live, and what do we leave? That question, the answer of which is the worth of our lives, can be rephrased in several ways. What will happen to our children sixty yards down the road? And our grandchildren? Born and unborn? And will they ever drive on civilization’s roads that are constricting the earth? And if so, for how long and how far?
Not very far, according to the huge lines of force pushing us towards an overwhelming conclusion; but maybe they will get some distance out of their lives if we join together, as humans have rarely done before, and bend those huge lines—then we can write a different ending.
Later for the bending. First our titular metaphor of the car going full speed ahead, even though the drivers see the sign: Bridge Out. I love metaphors! I have already assaulted your analogical sense with a fist, a cross, a monster, and this new analogy is not quite Steinbeck's turtle nor Route 66, but it’s got a bit more motion than both of them, and it's hurtling towards stone and steel, and it has us in it. And maybe we are more than metaphorically in it.
I just finished a ride pushing us perilously closer to that broken bridge. Motoring along in my 1992, G20, GMC, Custom Cruiser, I have just pumped 5.5 x 3.7 x 175 pounds of pollution into your air on a single trip. That’s 3,561 pounds of carbon dioxide! That makes me a hypocrite, choking even as I write...
From the book jacket