Twenty years ago while hunting for a house to rent in Mendocino, I had lunch with a local who gave me some valuable information about life here, including where here is. Mendocino is the name of a town, true, but when a local says he or she lives in Mendocino, he or she means they live somewhere between Westport in the north and Elk in the south, and somewhere on the coast to ten miles inland.
This local also forewarned me about the dense summer fog that can blanket the coast for weeks and even months at a stretch permitting no sun to shine upon the land. She said many people here succumb to fog-induced depression that can only be cured by going inland a few miles where the sun is shining brightly.
How right she was. We are currently in week two of Life In Fog, and though I’m accustomed to these stretches of gray timelessness, the body mind spirit consortium is really put to the test by this lack of sun. By that I mean, one doesn’t have to succumb to the gloom, but if one is already feeling a bit blue about something, the blues may easily grab one.
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Speaking of the blues, for most of my life I felt mighty blue about the unwillingness of humans to forsake violence and greed to work for the greater good of humanity and to work for the good of our mother earth who is hurting so badly from humanity’s misuse of her.
Now I’m no longer blue about that because I came to realize with the ascendancy of Trump and how his adherents and many others behaved during the Pandemic, and watching how things are unfolding now, that humans are behaving as humans have behaved since we evolved into modern humans a few hundred thousand years ago.
As with all other species of life on earth, our priorities are: having sufficient food and water, not being too hot or too cold, procreating, and protecting our offspring until they are able to survive on their own. If we have the time and the means to do things to give ourselves pleasure we’ll do that, too. And most importantly, we don’t care about other species except to try to eat them or use them to fulfill our priorities.
Yes, a tiny minority of humans deviate from this self-serving behavior, and some pre-industrial societies developed collective behavior practices designed to not overuse resources so future generations would have enough to eat, but by and large humans do what all species do: we take care of ourselves in the short term. And we think anyone who suggests we do otherwise is crazy.
For instance, air travel has been proven through many meticulous studies to be the cause of at least 25% of all greenhouse gases and the attendant global warming, and that number is probably closer to 50%. Yet millions of people who claim to care about the environment and the future of the earth continue to fly in jets multiple times a year. This seeming hypocrisy used to give me the blues. Now I understand these people are simply being human and giving themselves pleasure in the short term. They don’t really care about anything else. That’s how humans are.
And that, I feel, is why we the people elected Trump. He doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what he is: a self-serving human being just like the rest of us.
Or maybe I just feel this way because I haven’t seen the sun in a week.
fin