My small town had two high school campuses, despite being combined in sports, whose students would pick at each other. The story of the town paints a picture of a tiny suburb’s growth over time. East being the much older school, the first major school building in the area, more interesting architecture and smaller facilities, while West was new construction in a cornfield and was designed with a much bigger footprint and big gymnasium. Westies found reasons to hate Easties, supposedly, and vice-versa, but it never really mattered. At the end of the day, you were still in a small town near fully disconnected from city wealth. This may come off as trite but how we define our place in this world is so fleeting, so relative, so silly. And it produces an abundance of thoughts.
Zooming out, how empty is America compared to almost anywhere in Europe? Very empty. So empty. For its handful of cities, the Midwest has so much room for growth and expansion, with great human monuments yet to be built, but we envision with near-sightedness views of what constitutes humanity and culture what seems to matter. These lands are almost void of human life. Our generations choose to grow up and to move to our cities, out of curiosity, to become specializations of themselves, to try to fulfill roles within a society that uses us up, chews us up and spits us out. We could do vastly different things with our land and resources, with vastly different vision, if only we had the vision to do so, with no intention of stopping until we colored in each and every facet of this picture perfect place with our perfect human life. Nobody asks things from us that we must abide by, if we are powerful enough to overcome the oppression. So empower yourself and believe in a future scores of generations away. Believe in a future with magnitudes more people, magnitudes more growth, fewer inadequacies. Fill the gaps.
But that may not be sustainable, nor the right thing to do. It has been warned that humans have already done damage to our planet, work toward making it uninhabitable and barren that may be unchangeable. Chemistry, environmental externalities, combustion and pollution that set in motion world-ending changes that could forever shape the future of the planet. Or is it simply a lack of perspective? Is the observable Earth on a non-cyclical orbit around the Sun, shifting its trajectory year to year, changing on its own, far outside of the control of human hands? Are we capable of determining this? Are we confident in our assertions? Are we applying the limited tools of science for geopolitical ends?
The industry of science has convinced itself that its observations have a clear cause. That we are on a path of disaster, that we must do something, rather than nothing, to change course. A near complete consortium of consensus on a topic whose observable characteristics are very convincing. Whose data we have been collecting for only a very short amount of time, whose temperature fluctuations and changes in greenhouse gas measurements may be heterogenous beyond our capacity to even properly measure. Consensus that tramps out by design all room for the growth of alternative thought. Different ways of life. Different ideas of habitability. Different ideas of how American a real America might look, were it to fully expand inwardly.
This sort of thinking brings to mind a clear philosophical quandary – existentialism. A uniquely Americanized version of it, with two polarized sides rearing to have a go at each other to determine the future. Is the emptiness of America an observable emptiness? Is our slowing population growth something worth talking about? Will population growth turn negative? Is it true that America is doomed and nobody should be having kids? Or is it true that the colonies selfishly do not wish to bring upon themselves additional work of child-rearing and expanding into territories with less amenities and comforts, or is it true conversely that humans unselfishly do not wish to destroy the peace with which they find themselves with nature? Is nature itself not in the last 10,000 years not so deeply shaped by human hands that we can created a true distinction between touched and untouched, virgin lands or simply 500 years of unchecked growth which when tended to may become even more so supportive of human existence? Fuck if I know.
If we simply left the other continents alone, how many more humans could we bear in these forests, fields, pastures, meadows, plains, to improve its vibrancy, to replace with palaces and pyramids, libraries and lighthouses, homes and hightowers? To create castles and cathedrals, monasteries and missions, to take every last corner of this canvas and inoculate the warm grounds with the sweat of humankind’s legacy for all that it is worth?? There should be more than enough to go around if we are to organize in the right direction.. not around one party or the other, but to organize around deep philosophical truths – that humanity is to be expanded at all costs or it will find itself pushing the envelope of extinction without having found out its potential for creation.
America should not find itself so divided. This country is NOT its political systems, religious systems, nor its state boundaries, nor its pastors and prophets, nor its relations between Democrat and Republican, conservatives and liberals, ideologues and pragmaticians.
This is a place for us to dig deep and grow deep roots that will last generations, lifetimes, and create a real culture that lasts longer than 3 generations. Create connections that last longer than 3 generations. Create families that stay together longer than 3 generations. To not define ourselves not by the places we immigrated from, but to define ourselves as it may have done, as pioneers and expansionists, rugged individualists who explore deeply within and discover the resources teeming under the surface. There is near endless abundance if we are able to set aside the comforts that stop ourselves from invading its pastures. To apply science to its worthy causes of inward expansion, of improvements to our infrastructures, to improvements of our sustenances, to improvements of our agricultures, to improvements of our entire senses of self among the nothingness outside of this continent. Neither to slow ourselves down nor consider consequences, but to push ever forward to an extreme introspective isolation. Because while this planet is on a crash course with its own destiny, the timeline on which that happens is unknowable, yet inevitable. And rather than to shy away from spending the remaining years merely cowering inside the shadows of our doomed skyscrapers, monuments of peaks of human ingenuity in the presence of good geology and engineering accomplishments, but to push to live on the fringes with large multi-generational families. The macro trend and the micro trends simply all part of a bigger indiscernible and messy “pattern”. The messy and biological smearing of human life.
This is a country with the most clearly observable dichotomy and currently no unified, compelling directive – a society which stokes the flames of fear or and refuses to thrive in the hope of bigger tomorrows. To far too few is this choice clear. We must not be afraid of what the incumbent interests believe are the causal relationships between this, that, and the other. The systems that serve us our information are so rotten to the core that they would stop us from our own imaginations, our abilities to philosophize, our freedoms to believe what we believe.
Because these existing forces halt us, force us into economic systems that do not benefit us. Divide us into subclasses, into labels of each and every description, each fractured, creating dissonant narratives that implore us to never know the truth behind a supremely imbalanced bias of belief.. to hold beliefs so middling and uninspiring as to create an entire nation of slow-moving, brain constipated morons who must never question those whose only claims to this land amount to “we were here first”. To goad us into types of labor that do not benefit us. To draw us into the allure of the city centers, like moths to a flame, to never have our minds truly freed from all precedent.
These pressure cookers of human life, these cities, fabricate wildly and deeply various mechanisms of control that hold us back from the real fuel of human spirit – autonomy, freedom, expansion, life, our own versions of prosperity free from the stupidity and carefulness that the existing institutions inform us will benefit us.
So, retreat! Go out into the great wilderness and create log cabins. Burn down the forests for warmth. Eat all the animals for food. Pull out the rocks, and the oils, and extract the nutrients until it all turns arid and dry! Long live the individual who so strongly believes in themself that they can overcome these burdens of an otherwise barren existence, and turn it into a colorful and beautiful quilt of human activity.
Because on a long enough timeline… it all turns completely dark for one last time. Why put these 100,000 years before then to uselessness? The song will be played one last time. The final tree will fall in the ultimate forest and the last fungus will decompose its final meal. All will be quiet. Before then, here we are with ourselves, capable of reason, capable of many things, yet here we are to bicker over the relative fractions of a fuel tank whose gauge is forever illegible. The phrase of choice used to be You Only Live Once. Interestingly enough, were we to have many descendants, we would be capable of living many times over.
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