Dead End Tunnel

Whether on not we believe the details or even the fact of Baghdadi’s death, we all, or at least those of us with an ounce of decency, recoil at the thought of a father, or any adult, blowing himself up and taking three innocent children to their deaths with him. Time may tell whether and how one of the most sadistic murderers on the planet died, or what role another sadistic (orange) monster had in his demise. But that is not what interests me at the moment.

It’s those children. How, we ask, can anyone run down what he knows to be a dead end tunnel, dragging three children behind him to a certain, fiery death?

And yet, isn’t that exactly what we are doing in the face of the undeniable climate crisis bearing down on us? At very least we are allowing a handful of greedy, soulless, parasitical sociopaths and their self-absorbed, spineless enablers to lead us down a dead-end tunnel to a dying planet and the assured misery and early death of our own children, future generations and the vast majority of species remaining on what was once a living planet.

We recoil in horror at one man’s fanatical willingness to sacrifice thousands of lives and cause untold suffering to bring back, for the sake of some distorted religious beliefs, a 7th century “Caliphate.” But how is that any more insane than the fanatical willingness to sacrifice billions of lives and millions of species and cause untold suffering to maintain, for the sake of short-term profits, a 16th Century economic system premised on endless growth on a finite planet?

Asking for a few billion friends and other living things.