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So, what is truth?

June 16, 2017   ·   0 Comments

The eternal questions present no mysteries to me: the meaning of life; why 30-year-old marriages end; what is art – all those answers are clear and obvious.

However, there are other questions, more evasive in their answers, more prone to shrugging shoulders even by those who should know.

A Toronto-based newspaper recently reported that physicist Stephen Hawking says humanity has a mere 100 years to abandon this rapidly deteriorating planet to live some place else or accept becoming extinct.

Eleven people were invited to comment.

They said, variously: we can do better some planet else, referring to this earth as a “petri dish”; use  technology and the internet to avoid this and I love this planet (age 11); we must return to nature – if we don’t understand it, we can’t fix it; we have to leave here and use the moon as a jumping point; we need to a more technological way of providing  food to be ready to live on some other planet; we have to harmonize with the earth by the traditional ways of indigenous people; we need to better understand our bodies; there’s no time to make Mars work so we stay here and cool the work on AI; we should love each other and stop fighting so that we can pay more attention to earth; Stephen Hawking is right and the best thing is accept our fate and “make music, drink wine and be nice to animals;” and finally: let’s all just dance because dancing is so good for us – dancing lets go of darkness and lets in the light.

Well, well, we only have a hundred years. And what are the chances that, tomorrow morning, the Pres. of the USA will wake up saying “OMG – we have to stop fighting the bad guys, make friends of them somehow and save the planet!”? Or that any of the other very powerful climate-change deniers are similarly going to come to those happy conclusions?

How about the munitions manufacturers, oil companies, big pharma – will any of their executives suddenly realize how wrong it all is and want to stop doing business?

A recent study reported that 10% of the planet’s population is obese, with the USA holding the highest rate at 26.5%. The way people eat is the culprit, the study concluded, naming low nutrition, processed  foods. Just check the carts in the line ups at the grocery stores.

Over last weekend, I had the chance to chat to our honourable MP, David Tilson. I asked him to please take a question back to Ottawa for me and he acquiesced very kindly.

It was: “We regulate everything: all the foods  – everything. Yet, a cigarette is consumed just as much as food but there are no regulations to control  the 4,000 toxins in every cigarette, including formaldehyde, that tobacco companies put in them. Why is there no control?”

“We help people stop smoking,” he commented.

That costs a lot of money and the expense to the health care system from smoking is extremely high. All of which leads back to the question : everything we consume is regulated except for cigarettes, deadly, expensive, profoundly addictive.

Okay. We eat low-nutrition food; we smoke those unregulated 4,000 toxins; we are obsessively at war, national budgets crazy over military spending.

So many smaller countries are really getting things completely right about energy, organics, minimizing the use of drugs and chemicals at all – lots of them; even China has begun to understand that not being able to breathe the air is bad and something must be done.

Yet, our own Prime Minister – who we thought was on Mother Earth’s side – has agreed to planting more pipelines with the myopic focus on short-term financial benefits. In the extremely unlikely event that those pipelines never leak, the fact that they are pumping many more millions of bitumen every day means that the Asian market is still based on fossil fuel and that the tar sands are still one of the world’s worst pollution hotspots.

Stephen Hawking is not kidding but he makes such provocative statements as prods to us all. Grassroots revolutions can be effective but now there isn’t enough time.

For changes to made immediately  – and stop talking about decades from now – is all there is. Leaders across the world must wake up saying, in effect, “OMG – things have to change by this afternoon!”

There isn’t time for the wheels of change to move slowly. We don’t even have to invent anything – all the tools for saving ourselves and our world have been around for a long time.

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