The need to exercise dominion burbles from a well of deep insecurity. Intruding upon the American continent in the middle of the last millennium, the imperialist drive to subjugate nature was borne out of an infantile fear of the power of the forest and its dwellers. The genocidal impulse to terminate the indigenous populations reveals not only an inherent sadism, but also a trembling terror poorly masked by bluster and muskets. Like children who strike out and tantrum at that which they do not comprehend, at that which scares them, we colonized the sandbox, seeking to exclude anyone that was not within the circle in which we were comfortable.
It is a laughable fiction that we can ultimately outsmart or outmuscle our planet. If you have ever been held down by a set of waves, if you have ever been surrounded by the cement of an avalanche, if you have stood screaming noiselessly and wind-whipped in a haboob, you have glimpsed just a miniscule fraction of the energy which we impotently attempt to counter. Certainly, we have wounded our earthly residence, left it gashed and bleeding and angry, but those injuries are temporary and serve only to make our home ironically inhospitable.
Equally foolhardy is the notion that one sect of flawed humans is superior to another. Enslaving a population, literally or through figurative circumstance, is only to telegraph the moral weakness of the oppressor, to feint hatred of another to cover one’s own self-loathing. Creating an “other” is to form an unnecessary taxonomy – there is no label necessary besides human. The truly secure, the assuredly proud do not need to subsume another for their own gain, they are already comfortable with themselves.
Undergirding our socioeconomic structure is the fallacy that a sliver of the planet can belong to an individual. Ownership of land is an illusion. Metaphysically, the idea that a temporally transient animal can lay claim to a portion of a rock spinning and hurtling through space seems to miss the larger concept of existence. I can picture the aliens laughing at our naivete as we devote our finite energies to things that simply do not matter.
Practically and as a matter of financial reality, the cowpoke defending “his” ranch with “his” Second Amendment rights is comically misinformed. That land is controlled by a bank that has securitized the pastures and livestock, the grass and pigs reduced to mere digital entries in a swirling, arcane, and rigged capitalist miasma. What he protects is a private equity firm’s rights to remove his family from the land after generations.
The cowboy archetype, that bowlegged manifestation of toxic masculinity and racist stupidity, is a convenient symbol for a political machine that gives him and his ilk the feeling of power when indeed it would crush them as an elephant to an ant. Their alleged right to bear arms is hollow – a constitution that binds hundreds of millions of people in a pact of democratic ideals is meaningless when those basic principles are eroded and ignored.
Neither cowed nor cowardly, the downtrodden maintain their humanity, their essential character, their culture, their will to live despite the great odds stacked against them. If anything, they are energized by the knowledge that their mere existence is a threat to the little boys and girls posing as men and women, the halls of government being little more than a kindergarten graduation, the kids in their finest suits and dresses, but their behavior unpredictable and petulant.
Arbitrary borders drawn by those who were fortuitously inside their lines are nothing more than demarcations on a map. They do not determine worth, they do not delineate anything save for a naked grab for land and therefore power, that age-old seductress for those horny for meaning for their pathetic, hate-filled lives. The idea that an imaginary contour marks the boundary between good and evil would be laughable if not held so strongly by those that cannot look themselves in the mirror without becoming nauseous.
When we have finally exhausted the patience of Mother Nature, she will begrudgingly and with a sad heart let us slip away into oblivion, just as the parent of an addict must finally draw the line, knowing that all of the warnings and ultimatums and assistance and tears were ultimately for naught. Home ownership is posited as a dream, but worthless is the deed to a house that is flooded by rising seas or burned to a crisp by wildfires or tossed into the ether by a tornado, regardless of the effort and money and stress spent in securing title to the property.
In a time when our errant overlords are trying to fit us in blinders, it is even more important to see the big picture. We are not independent of our species, nor of our environment, so a celebration of our insularity seems like a weird party. Nationalism, whether here or abroad, is not to be encouraged in a world that should be without boundaries, that should be simply an oblate spheroid of limitless possibility. The fireworks are lost on me in this era – I would rather rejoice at unity, at peace, at compassion. Maybe next year.