Dave Pollard offers a long reflection on what we’ve learned from the year-ago tsunami, the more recent hurricanes, and other dismaying events of modern life.
Things
are the way they are for a reason. We aren’t prepared because we don’t
want to know what might happen, and because we aren’t prepared to bear
the cost of being prepared. It is in our nature not
to be prepared, to take things as they come, to live for the moment.
And while the cost of not knowing is astronomical, as the tsunami and
Katrina and all the other catastrophes that we deal with, badly, every
day, shows us, the cost of knowing
— what we are doing to this world, and the consequences of those
actions, from the abuse that is happening behind every closed door on
the planet to the great extinction that we are precipitating — is even
higher. We don’t want to know. We don’t want to hear about it. That is knowledge we cannot handle.
This is worth chewing on, slowly. If it is in fact ‘in our nature not
to be prepared,’ and yet we must be prepared, how to we find the way to overcome our nature?