Even in this week of religious import, amid rites of deliverance and great promise, things can seem bleak. The anthropologist in me, the one who was trained by cultural ecologists in the 1970’s, sees the millennium in stark and not so promising terms. In this world view, all of humanity’s goings-on are viewed from a great height and distilled in one way or another to competition for energy and resources. From up here in the catbird seat, symptoms as various as global warming, the financial collapse, a congress full of tea-baggers, international terrorism, Marcellus shale extraction, brutal despots, the national deficit, grinding poverty, rainforest depletion, HIV, ethnic and religious warfare, water pollution, crooked jurists, and so on are just multiple manifestations of the same illness. The one nobody at Fox or NPR wants to talk about.
We are too many.
We have too much, and want too much, and waste too much. Those that have little, want. Those with some, want more and those with much would like to double it. This is not a sustainable model. Resources of all kinds are finite, period. We will inexorably exhaust what we have and die in the stink of our own waste, because we won’t even talk about it, much less address it.
And that, friends and neighbors, is that.
So tonight I dragged my sorry and cynical ass into the birthing center at the local hospital, where my niece placed her 6 pound, 12 ounce newborn daughter in my lap. As I slowly rocked the sleeping infant, I felt something deep and elemental and surprisingly powerful emanating from this little person, something parents feel in every quiet moment. Yes, I know she will grow to use her full measure of hydrocarbons, raw materials and kilocalories, and will help fill the county dump. She will likely bring more children into the world too, and make the problem even worse. I know all that, but still I smile at what is possible. In exchange for what she will take, there is no knowing what she will give. I may be holding a great peacemaker who will persuade the folks on both sides of the Jordan to lower their weapons and embrace each other. I may be holding a doctor that cures what is now incurable and brings comfort and hope to the sick and frightened. I may be holding the brilliant engineer who turns our waste into energy and beats our swords into plowshares. There may be poetry and music and laughter and great ideas fast asleep in the crook of my arm.
This quiet little thing is no dark symbol of the end of days. She is cause for hope.
Peace to everyone at Easter time and Passover…
