“Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world. America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.”
Henry Miller, “The Tropic of Cancer,” 1961
“Our entire much praised technological progress and civilization, generally, could be compared to an ax in the hand of a pathological criminal.”
Albert Einstein
Everywhere we turn we can hear a new silence, a new speech as if the plague had turned the human skin inside out and we could hear our own breathing for the first time in generations. In the teeming desert out West, much of civilization as we have known it is on pause like a giant glove over the human mind. People are encouraged or kept from crossing state lines. National Parks are keeping people out. But it is there among the vast sweeping landscapes where one can still see the horizon where we once met a Shoshone elder, Corbin Harney, at the Nevada test site on Mother’s Day in 1999, the last such day of the 20th century. It was Dostoyevsky who once said, “Everything depends on the 20th century.” The seed of who we are now, yes. The source of our runaway mechanistic civilization that sees nothing as sacred. But now everything truly depends on the 21st century, as if our very lives depended on us transforming into a mature species.
America is changing by the minute. Add Changing America to your Facebook and Twitter
There is a stillness in the desert that induces a tranquility in one’s mind that accentuates the essential, the sand, the stars, the all abiding, transformative silence. It is in the deserts that the prophets went to gain insight, enlightenment or simply to be. There is a raw unbeaten corridor of intelligence that one cannot hear in the machine-filled asphalt pageant that occupies the heart of the modern world. It was outside of Las Vegas in the desert where America staged the largest military operation in the history of the human species. Over 800 nuclear tests have unleashed radiation that still dent the wind, the wildflowers, wildlife and people who inhabit the spectrum of this vast basin world.
Corbin Harney was a strong, stout bear of a human whose eyes has seen both worlds, the technological society’s that has desecrated Natural Law, and his people whom the elders have told him will eventually lead the dominant society out of the valley of its own ignorance. “We’re not helping Mother Earth at all,” he said. “The roots, the berries, the animals, are not here anymore, nothing’s here. It’s sad. We’re selling the air, the water, we’re already selling each other. Somewhere it’s going to come to an end.” Corbin predicted there would be plagues coming out of the ocean 20 years ago and storms bigger than anything America has ever known. Now we have red tides. Witness the tornadoes overrunning the Midwest and the South. Witness now the pandemic. It is a natural corollary of our behavior.
Jacques Ellul, the historian of technology, wrote in the “Technological Society,” “Man has always known wide horizons. Even the city dweller had direct contact with limitless plains, mountains and seas. Beyond the enclosing walls of the medieval city, was open country. Today man knows only bounded horizons and reduced dimensions. The space not only of his movements but of his gaze is shrinking.”
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW RIGHT NOW ABOUT CORONAVIRUS IN AMERICA
HERE’S WHEN THE CORONAVIRUS WILL PEAK IN YOUR STATE
HARVARD SCIENTISTS CAN TELL YOU IF SOMEONE NEAR YOU HAS TESTED FOR CORONAVIRUS
FAUCI PREDICTS ANOTHER CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK IN THE FALL WITH ‘VERY DIFFERENT’ OUTCOME
FAUCI: RECOVERED CORONAVIRUS PATIENTS WILL LIKELY BE IMMUNE IF SECOND WAVE HITS IN THE FALL
NOBEL PREDICTS US WILL HAVE MUCH FASTER RECOVERY THAN EXPECTED
HERE ARE THE BEST MAPS TO CHECK OUT THE CURRENT STATE OF THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC
Corbin’s words reflect a speech about absolute reverence for the living and seemingly inanimate world and his anger about the military foundation of a civilization that has run amuck. He speaks from a concern that we may be the last viable generation. In fighting the Department of Energy Corbin questioned the rationale the dominant society has for its nuclear tests. “They want to take advantage of it, the Earth, and use it, and misuse it,” he said. “We see that throughout the world. That’s the way I see the white man today — termites. They want to destroy things. They’re putting nothing back into it. No give — just take.”
Corbin’s words embody that of an elder’s and reflect the words of our society’s largely forgotten seers, people like DH Lawrence, who came to the new world on a “savage pilgrimage” and who would have understood every prophetic word of Corbin’s. But while there was new ground to cover and explore in the 1920s, there is no place to turn for salvation today. The nuclear sword reaches everywhere. While coyotes barked under the magenta twilight of the desert, a young protester brought a message from DH Lawrence, “When we get out of the glass bottles our ego and when we escape like squirrels in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in and passion will wake our bodies taut with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.”
The economic metabolism of humanity is being tested as never before. Two generations before the nuclear tests in the South Pacific, the painter Paul Gauguin went to Tahiti, where he wrote about the natives, “They had been richly endowed with an instinctive feeling for the harmony necessary between human creations and the animal and plant life which formed the setting and decoration for their existence, but this had now been lost.” In Nevada, we heard frogs casting an amazing spell over the desert forest. It was more than singing, more than a cadence and a cry. More than a chorus. It was a speech born of the greater silence beyond.
One thinks of the nuclear waste buried here and wonders, why? One heard of generations of new bunker-busting nuclear devices. How would these make the world safer? How did we ever come to violate the laws of nature? God, the Creator, the Universe had become increasingly an abstraction, not in astronomical, scientific terms but in terms of our place on Earth. What we are doing to the Earth is unimaginable. No other creature in the billion-year old history of life on Earth has even remotely convulsed the planet as we have.
The plague is a silencing mechanism, the tragic antidote to the ravages we have daily inflicted on this small orb since the late 18th century. Now 40 percent of the world’s insects are threatened with silence. All over the world, the tree of life is being uprooted at a rate of a British Isles every year. Here at the test site the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil has been usurped and cut down. Everywhere else on earth the Trees of Life, as in Avatar, were being felled. The Amazon, Borneo, Burma, the Boreal, the Congo were names that would be added to the holocaust of the green. Corbin had seen it. It was the definition of our time. The nuclear tipped society and the high priests of science could never ever conceive of a first peoples having the answers to existence and the nature of reality.
Hundreds of protesters, mainly young people, marched towards the Nevada test site, towards the fence beyond which lay the arsenal of our potential annihilation. In our blood, millions of minute projectiles in the form of coronaviruses are daily acting as vehicles of silence for many individuals and causing a standstill in the human arsenal, biologically, economically and cosmically.
Who did we dare think we are? Who are we? Can we transcend ourselves after this pandemic? Pollution clouds have dissipated worldwide. At the Nevada test site there was a picture of a polar bear on someone’s car, a logo representing an investment company at the test site. A cuddly teddy bear from childhood staring at people marching for their future. It was an ad for a bull market and the processes of economic expansion that were ironically the very agent guilty of dismantling the ecosphere. How had the human species ever come to play Nero to the several million other species on this Earth? We dare not go back to the way things were. We will unravel. The earth can’t take it anymore.
Learn more about Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson’s work at their website.
READ OUR BREAKING NEWS ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC
HERE ARE THE 6 WAYS THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC COULD END
CAN LYSOL OR CLOROX KILL THE CORONAVIRUS?
CAN YOU GET CORONAVIRUS TWICE?
CAN I SHOP FOR GROCERIES SAFELY DURING THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC?
HAVE I ALREADY HAD CORONAVIRUS? HOW CAN I TELL?
changing america copyright.
