An unhealthy fixation...
This circular reasoning, this endless mental narrative is nothing new to Oggy. In fact, the annihilation of the earth, extinction, suffering, are all stars in the circus Oggy imagines is his life. Yet it haunts him. He thinks that only a great uprising will cure the world of its ills. Mercury Poisoning, for instance, is a topic of great interest to Oggy. Mercury. Imagine. Where does it come from?
Now, if every fish in the ocean is contaminated by mercury (and this is a debatable assertion) then what have we humans done. Fish only live a year or two. So there is so much mercury in the ocean that a fish can not live for one year without deadly contamination? That is astonishing. Except for volcanic eruptions the main sources of Mercury contamination have only existed for 150 years. The ocean, last time Oggy checked, is damn big. Man has contaminated the entire ocean in just 150 years? Oh, lord. And supermarkets in California (under proposition 65) are required to warn customers that they are entering a location where substances that cause cancer are known to exist. In this case the substances are the Atlantic Tuna on sale for $3.99 a pound. Is Oggy missing something?
But that is one of many pressing issues Oggy now spends most of his waking hours ruminating on. And, as is often the case, the ruminating has become an end in itself. It becomes a metaphysical process. "I am ruminating on hopeless predicaments, which is in itself a hopeless predicament." thinks Oggy as he assembles yet another circuit board or watching the news about a tragic loss of life in East L.A.
Oggy thinks this Mercury poisoning is such a serious problem and it is so out of hand that he can not see a solution. Not in the lifespan of the planet earth. It's literally a problem that will never be solved. The oceans are permanently contaminated. But if it's a problem that will never be solved then Man is doomed. We can only adapt to chronic cancer and birth defects. But are birth defects something that a species adapts to? And is death an adaptation? Oggy doesn't think so. Then Oggy considers the likelihood that Mercury poisoning of the oceans of the only planet in the solar system with an ocean is not even the worst problem facing this planet. That mercury poisoning actually pales in comparison with the quick and destructive power of either air that is unbreathable or air that is 70 degrees below zero and glaciers 2000 ft thick. Oh, man can survive for a few weeks in such conditions. We are hearty enough, but long enough to have children. And will the offspring mature in such conditions? What kind of an animal brings these questions on itself?
So Oggy will ponder this predicament for hours and hours, days and days. Maybe a solution will come to him...until he considers the possibility that perhaps Man deserves the slow decline of a self-poisoned animal. Then Oggy watches the mobilization of America to defeat Germany and Japan and Italy in 1941. In just 4 years America did something that was unimaginable. Every person contributed (except for the damned hippy conscientious objectors) and a war that should have lasted for 20 or 30 years was over in 4. Yes some 60 million people died in the process but those 60 million were replaced by 1947. Then Oggy thinks that this incredible movement in 1941-1945 created such a force, such momentum, such inertia, that it just kept going. America had won the war but it's industries pretended like we were still at war. Truman and those presidents who followed him made the decision never to be caught off guard again. Never again would we play catch-up during time of war (Our 1940 armaments were from 1919). No. We would be a leader in armaments, technology, strategic defense, planes, ships, EVERYTHING. Oggy can't blame them. If he had seen those damned dirty japs killing his boys is some stinking trench in Malaysia then he would've done the same thing. BUT!
That decision to prepare for a war that, given the atomic bombs, would be the end of humanity was a bad decision. Not only did it guarantee that the next war would decimate mankind, but it asked everyone to IGNORE THE FUTURE. Dumping Mercury in the S.F. bay? Don't worry, it's for national defense. Strip-mining the West Virginia mountains and destroying entire watersheds in Oregon? Hey, do you wanna see another Pearl Harbor because our radar is inferior? Well...not really, but...Then came the "communist threat" another excuse to further the buildup, to continue the push for military dominance and extend the ignorance. During a time when populations were exploding and Man's impact on the fragile environment was growing, the time between 1870-1960, just 90 years, unfortunately corresponded with great political and ethnic strife. Maybe political and ethnic strife is always present so it's the other way around. Either way, that strife, that bloodshed and bitter conflict forced us to ignore the lasting impact of our actions. We would win the war, but basically make the Earth uninhabitable in the process. It's folly. It's a grand folly of tears. Generations of bloodshed are one thing, but the wholesale destruction and contamination of the environment is another. No one tried to destroy the environment. They just ignored the consequences.
Oggy can imagine the early engineers in 1850 believing that the resources were unlimited and the effects would be completely acute and temporary. That is conceivable. Even in 1900, when the contiguous U.S. was complete, the space must have been so vast that no engineer could have imagined our people having a lasting effect on the environment. "We're as small as ants on a football field." they must have said. Well, the football field stayed the same size, and the ants multiplied, but it is our EFFECT that went berserk. Our industries became so efficient, our mining, once done by hand (ha) became a million times faster and a million times larger. The S.F. bay was once brown because of the gold mining done 200 miles east. The runoff of hills just filled the bay to the point that it had to be dredged of silt and finally laws were passed to limit the runoff. That was in 1850-1860. In 2007 there are regions of Arizona and China that have mining operations as large as cities.
"A little-known island continent of floating toxic plastic garbage, TWICE the size of Texas, is growing in the pacific between California and Hawaii. Officially known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,"
That's the kind of stuff Oggy can't deal with. Texas is the second largest state in the country. It's huge. It takes two days to drive across it (when in a 1981 Datsun 200sx going 52 mph). And there is an island of GARBAGE? Now, plastics, the kind of purely disposable plastics that we all know and love, have only existed for 20-30 years. So in 25 years we have created a continent of plastic trash that's as big as Texas? IS it possible that in 25 more years, in 2030, Oggy will be able to walk from Los Angeles to Hawaii on a pile of garbage? Reports are coming from fisherman of animals caught who are BLOATED with plastic. These animals are not much different from dogs. They eat just about everything. If it's moving and will fit in its mouth then they will take their chance and see if it is edible. Plastic is not edible and these fish, dolphins, whales, etc. are eating the plastic (or maybe they just run into the continent and swim through it and ingest the plastic like we screen out airborne carcinogens with our lungs) and they are filled with the plastic. Oggy is an animal lover. He likes animals because even though they are not all peaceful and furry, they have an innate understanding of what their environment will tolerate. Mankind obviously does not have this understanding. Not if we can negligently create a continent of garbage as well as contaminate the entire ocean. No. That kind of animal is repulsive. Oggy doesn't separate animals from mankind. We are all animals in his eyes. But as smart and industrious as we are, Oggy is horrified by these reports. They are sign of a chronic disease of ignorance and negligence. Somehow between 1850 and now we have managed to actually TRAIN our offspring to ignore the effects of our actions on the environment. That's the conclusion Oggy has reached because he does not believe that an animal, a simple hairless mammal, would naturally do something as heinous as contaminate the oceans UNLESS he had been trained to ignore this destruction as it was happening. So Oggy is unhappy with the school system because it failed him. It failed to completely brainwash him into thinking the earth was his to destroy. He would especially like to condemn his first grade teacher for teaching him to respect the environment and to take only what he could eat from the buffet table. That bastard! Instead of taking Oggy to the marshes by the old cemetery to teach him about grasshoppers and butterflies and the fragile marsh ecosystem that relied on clean water and undisturbed soil this bastard should have been taking Oggy to the local oil refinery plant where spills (into the river) were completely normal and acceptable as long as the bills were paid. What a difference this kind of moral upbringing would have made to Oggy. Instead of laying inertly on some second hand couch that smells of four different dogs and was found on the sidewalk, Oggy could be living the rich life, making real estate deals that involve some old trees or Indian reservation land. Because Oggy actually took this first grade teacher's words seriously, because Oggy came to respect the environment and consider the impact of his actions, he is now completely fucked. He is fucked because the problems the environment now faces are intractable. This one irreplaceable environment that Oggy has dedicated himself to preserving (or at least not actively destroying) is now in peril. The very people who need to act (people between 15-80 y/o) have been completely brainwashed into ignoring the dilemma. The leadership that should have been mobilized in 1950, has been completely useless for 60 years. It seems the course of human history has been designed to destroy the environment by around 2025. It's not that there is a chance we can save the environment. No. That chance passed in 1950 when automobile manufacturers started making more cars than could be purchased by Americans. No, the only question now is when everything we eat will be contaminated by Mercury. What year will it be when every American has some form of cancer? When will fishing become antiquated like shooting buffalo from a train?
"Fishing? No one fishes anymore. Ain't no clean fish to catch! You seen the ocean lately?"
Oggy is confident the peril will reach a point when no one will be able to ignore it (A fucking continent of garbage in the middle of the pacific ocean?) and the president will read some speech written by some punk who stole passages from Thoreau's writings, and plastic bags will be outlawed and Best Buy will close and garbage scows will be sent to the Pacific ocean to screen the garbage off the surface. They will project a 40 year clean up and America will be the only country to contribute to the clean up effort even through it just adds to the trillions of dollars in deficit we carry. At some point the problem will be too big to ignore and schools will teach the errors of our ways, like when Oggy learned of the silt from gold mining. The problem, again, is that the magnitude of this destruction is far larger than 1850 gold mining in the Sierras. This is global, oceanic destruction. This is the idea of not being able to breathe or drink, of chronic cancer and birth defects, sterilization, famine.
In 1941 America found the perfect opportunity to DO SOMETHING. The War gave them excuse to work 24 hours a day for four years. This situation is completely different. Yes, we need to clean up the continent of garbage, but the way to insure it doesn't return, the way to protect the environment is the hardest thing for Americans to do: nothing. We're a people who like to move, to buy, to create, to sell, to invent. And if we lived on a planet with unlimited resources then these attributes would be of great use. Unfortunately, The Jetsons was a cartoon, and the actual planet we live on has finite resources and a highly fragile environment. Because of our industries and cleverness we now impact this environment with just about every purchase we make. So the answer is not to do more, but to do less. Oggy has ruminated on the possibility that the very industriousness and persistence that made winning WWII possible can also make possible the escape from our problem environment. And that's probably true for the very rich who can afford that solution or will be allowed to purchase that solution. For the rest of us we will be on our own. IT will be genocide by default. The poor will not be killed so much as ignored. We will not be provided the opportunity to survive. The rich will simply go into orbit for a few years and monitor our desperate struggle from above, until we all succumb. It will take longer than expected, but it will happen. Maybe it's inevitable. Maybe it's destiny. Maybe that's why the Jetsons world didn't have black people. They weren't allowed to buy the cancer drugs or let into the spaceships to go into safe orbit.
Before that takes place we probably don't have a chance to escape. The ocean is contaminated already. It's too late to save it. We can boycott Best Buy and Walmart all we want. Is that going to decontaminate the ocean? No. Is that going to clean up the contaminated groundwater in Arizona? No. That's a job that's too big. Oggy doesn't mind trash or garbage. He doesn't have a violent hate of a candy wrapper in a park, for instance. The IDEA of garbage is not a problem. Waste, on the other hand is, philosophically, repulsive. But the real problem is that waste and garbage are never just the problem in and of themselves. They CREATE problems of their own. An island of garbage is no big deal. But the truth is that it starts a chain reaction that always leads back to people and bites us in the ass. The causality is clear to Oggy. He sees the ultimate effect of these problems and it is all bad.
Maybe the question Oggy would like to ask is this: Can an animal create such a mess that it can't clean it up? Obviously elephants or mice aren't going to clean up our mess. But can mankind clean up our own mess? Oggy doesn't think so, but he also finds it hard to believe what America did in 1941. (Everyone recycled religiously. They even recycled nylon stocking for parachutes! Oggy's neighbors can barely put cardboard in their blue bin and roll it ten feet onto the street. Fucking pathetic!) So Oggy could be wrong. Maybe a collective movement and a brilliant mercury magnet that screened all the mercury from the ocean and a couple big freighters vacuuming the pacific ocean could clean the trash up. And if all the strip mining companies shut down. And all cars ran on hydroelectric-source electricity and were manufactured with recycled steel and plastic...maybe. But there were 3 billion fewer people in 1941. America was so much smaller...but then the internet has allowed information to travel faster. Maybe it's possible. Oggy isn't going anywhere. He might move to Central America or New Mexico or Florida, but he's going to stick around to see if this is possible...or at least watch the ship sink.
Mercury enters the environment as a pollutant from various industries:
- coal-fired power plants are the largest aggregate source (40% of USA emissions in 1999).[3]
- large gold mines — the three largest point sources for mercury emissions in the US are the three largest gold mines[4]
- gas fired power plants fueled with gas from mercury prone reservoirs where the mercury has not been removed
- small-scale gold mining
- industrial processes
- medical applications, including vaccinations
- dentistry
- cosmetic industries
- laboratory work involving mercury compounds
Now, if every fish in the ocean is contaminated by mercury (and this is a debatable assertion) then what have we humans done. Fish only live a year or two. So there is so much mercury in the ocean that a fish can not live for one year without deadly contamination? That is astonishing. Except for volcanic eruptions the main sources of Mercury contamination have only existed for 150 years. The ocean, last time Oggy checked, is damn big. Man has contaminated the entire ocean in just 150 years? Oh, lord. And supermarkets in California (under proposition 65) are required to warn customers that they are entering a location where substances that cause cancer are known to exist. In this case the substances are the Atlantic Tuna on sale for $3.99 a pound. Is Oggy missing something?
But that is one of many pressing issues Oggy now spends most of his waking hours ruminating on. And, as is often the case, the ruminating has become an end in itself. It becomes a metaphysical process. "I am ruminating on hopeless predicaments, which is in itself a hopeless predicament." thinks Oggy as he assembles yet another circuit board or watching the news about a tragic loss of life in East L.A.
Oggy thinks this Mercury poisoning is such a serious problem and it is so out of hand that he can not see a solution. Not in the lifespan of the planet earth. It's literally a problem that will never be solved. The oceans are permanently contaminated. But if it's a problem that will never be solved then Man is doomed. We can only adapt to chronic cancer and birth defects. But are birth defects something that a species adapts to? And is death an adaptation? Oggy doesn't think so. Then Oggy considers the likelihood that Mercury poisoning of the oceans of the only planet in the solar system with an ocean is not even the worst problem facing this planet. That mercury poisoning actually pales in comparison with the quick and destructive power of either air that is unbreathable or air that is 70 degrees below zero and glaciers 2000 ft thick. Oh, man can survive for a few weeks in such conditions. We are hearty enough, but long enough to have children. And will the offspring mature in such conditions? What kind of an animal brings these questions on itself?
So Oggy will ponder this predicament for hours and hours, days and days. Maybe a solution will come to him...until he considers the possibility that perhaps Man deserves the slow decline of a self-poisoned animal. Then Oggy watches the mobilization of America to defeat Germany and Japan and Italy in 1941. In just 4 years America did something that was unimaginable. Every person contributed (except for the damned hippy conscientious objectors) and a war that should have lasted for 20 or 30 years was over in 4. Yes some 60 million people died in the process but those 60 million were replaced by 1947. Then Oggy thinks that this incredible movement in 1941-1945 created such a force, such momentum, such inertia, that it just kept going. America had won the war but it's industries pretended like we were still at war. Truman and those presidents who followed him made the decision never to be caught off guard again. Never again would we play catch-up during time of war (Our 1940 armaments were from 1919). No. We would be a leader in armaments, technology, strategic defense, planes, ships, EVERYTHING. Oggy can't blame them. If he had seen those damned dirty japs killing his boys is some stinking trench in Malaysia then he would've done the same thing. BUT!
That decision to prepare for a war that, given the atomic bombs, would be the end of humanity was a bad decision. Not only did it guarantee that the next war would decimate mankind, but it asked everyone to IGNORE THE FUTURE. Dumping Mercury in the S.F. bay? Don't worry, it's for national defense. Strip-mining the West Virginia mountains and destroying entire watersheds in Oregon? Hey, do you wanna see another Pearl Harbor because our radar is inferior? Well...not really, but...Then came the "communist threat" another excuse to further the buildup, to continue the push for military dominance and extend the ignorance. During a time when populations were exploding and Man's impact on the fragile environment was growing, the time between 1870-1960, just 90 years, unfortunately corresponded with great political and ethnic strife. Maybe political and ethnic strife is always present so it's the other way around. Either way, that strife, that bloodshed and bitter conflict forced us to ignore the lasting impact of our actions. We would win the war, but basically make the Earth uninhabitable in the process. It's folly. It's a grand folly of tears. Generations of bloodshed are one thing, but the wholesale destruction and contamination of the environment is another. No one tried to destroy the environment. They just ignored the consequences.
Oggy can imagine the early engineers in 1850 believing that the resources were unlimited and the effects would be completely acute and temporary. That is conceivable. Even in 1900, when the contiguous U.S. was complete, the space must have been so vast that no engineer could have imagined our people having a lasting effect on the environment. "We're as small as ants on a football field." they must have said. Well, the football field stayed the same size, and the ants multiplied, but it is our EFFECT that went berserk. Our industries became so efficient, our mining, once done by hand (ha) became a million times faster and a million times larger. The S.F. bay was once brown because of the gold mining done 200 miles east. The runoff of hills just filled the bay to the point that it had to be dredged of silt and finally laws were passed to limit the runoff. That was in 1850-1860. In 2007 there are regions of Arizona and China that have mining operations as large as cities.
"A little-known island continent of floating toxic plastic garbage, TWICE the size of Texas, is growing in the pacific between California and Hawaii. Officially known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,"
That's the kind of stuff Oggy can't deal with. Texas is the second largest state in the country. It's huge. It takes two days to drive across it (when in a 1981 Datsun 200sx going 52 mph). And there is an island of GARBAGE? Now, plastics, the kind of purely disposable plastics that we all know and love, have only existed for 20-30 years. So in 25 years we have created a continent of plastic trash that's as big as Texas? IS it possible that in 25 more years, in 2030, Oggy will be able to walk from Los Angeles to Hawaii on a pile of garbage? Reports are coming from fisherman of animals caught who are BLOATED with plastic. These animals are not much different from dogs. They eat just about everything. If it's moving and will fit in its mouth then they will take their chance and see if it is edible. Plastic is not edible and these fish, dolphins, whales, etc. are eating the plastic (or maybe they just run into the continent and swim through it and ingest the plastic like we screen out airborne carcinogens with our lungs) and they are filled with the plastic. Oggy is an animal lover. He likes animals because even though they are not all peaceful and furry, they have an innate understanding of what their environment will tolerate. Mankind obviously does not have this understanding. Not if we can negligently create a continent of garbage as well as contaminate the entire ocean. No. That kind of animal is repulsive. Oggy doesn't separate animals from mankind. We are all animals in his eyes. But as smart and industrious as we are, Oggy is horrified by these reports. They are sign of a chronic disease of ignorance and negligence. Somehow between 1850 and now we have managed to actually TRAIN our offspring to ignore the effects of our actions on the environment. That's the conclusion Oggy has reached because he does not believe that an animal, a simple hairless mammal, would naturally do something as heinous as contaminate the oceans UNLESS he had been trained to ignore this destruction as it was happening. So Oggy is unhappy with the school system because it failed him. It failed to completely brainwash him into thinking the earth was his to destroy. He would especially like to condemn his first grade teacher for teaching him to respect the environment and to take only what he could eat from the buffet table. That bastard! Instead of taking Oggy to the marshes by the old cemetery to teach him about grasshoppers and butterflies and the fragile marsh ecosystem that relied on clean water and undisturbed soil this bastard should have been taking Oggy to the local oil refinery plant where spills (into the river) were completely normal and acceptable as long as the bills were paid. What a difference this kind of moral upbringing would have made to Oggy. Instead of laying inertly on some second hand couch that smells of four different dogs and was found on the sidewalk, Oggy could be living the rich life, making real estate deals that involve some old trees or Indian reservation land. Because Oggy actually took this first grade teacher's words seriously, because Oggy came to respect the environment and consider the impact of his actions, he is now completely fucked. He is fucked because the problems the environment now faces are intractable. This one irreplaceable environment that Oggy has dedicated himself to preserving (or at least not actively destroying) is now in peril. The very people who need to act (people between 15-80 y/o) have been completely brainwashed into ignoring the dilemma. The leadership that should have been mobilized in 1950, has been completely useless for 60 years. It seems the course of human history has been designed to destroy the environment by around 2025. It's not that there is a chance we can save the environment. No. That chance passed in 1950 when automobile manufacturers started making more cars than could be purchased by Americans. No, the only question now is when everything we eat will be contaminated by Mercury. What year will it be when every American has some form of cancer? When will fishing become antiquated like shooting buffalo from a train?
"Fishing? No one fishes anymore. Ain't no clean fish to catch! You seen the ocean lately?"
Oggy is confident the peril will reach a point when no one will be able to ignore it (A fucking continent of garbage in the middle of the pacific ocean?) and the president will read some speech written by some punk who stole passages from Thoreau's writings, and plastic bags will be outlawed and Best Buy will close and garbage scows will be sent to the Pacific ocean to screen the garbage off the surface. They will project a 40 year clean up and America will be the only country to contribute to the clean up effort even through it just adds to the trillions of dollars in deficit we carry. At some point the problem will be too big to ignore and schools will teach the errors of our ways, like when Oggy learned of the silt from gold mining. The problem, again, is that the magnitude of this destruction is far larger than 1850 gold mining in the Sierras. This is global, oceanic destruction. This is the idea of not being able to breathe or drink, of chronic cancer and birth defects, sterilization, famine.
In 1941 America found the perfect opportunity to DO SOMETHING. The War gave them excuse to work 24 hours a day for four years. This situation is completely different. Yes, we need to clean up the continent of garbage, but the way to insure it doesn't return, the way to protect the environment is the hardest thing for Americans to do: nothing. We're a people who like to move, to buy, to create, to sell, to invent. And if we lived on a planet with unlimited resources then these attributes would be of great use. Unfortunately, The Jetsons was a cartoon, and the actual planet we live on has finite resources and a highly fragile environment. Because of our industries and cleverness we now impact this environment with just about every purchase we make. So the answer is not to do more, but to do less. Oggy has ruminated on the possibility that the very industriousness and persistence that made winning WWII possible can also make possible the escape from our problem environment. And that's probably true for the very rich who can afford that solution or will be allowed to purchase that solution. For the rest of us we will be on our own. IT will be genocide by default. The poor will not be killed so much as ignored. We will not be provided the opportunity to survive. The rich will simply go into orbit for a few years and monitor our desperate struggle from above, until we all succumb. It will take longer than expected, but it will happen. Maybe it's inevitable. Maybe it's destiny. Maybe that's why the Jetsons world didn't have black people. They weren't allowed to buy the cancer drugs or let into the spaceships to go into safe orbit.
Before that takes place we probably don't have a chance to escape. The ocean is contaminated already. It's too late to save it. We can boycott Best Buy and Walmart all we want. Is that going to decontaminate the ocean? No. Is that going to clean up the contaminated groundwater in Arizona? No. That's a job that's too big. Oggy doesn't mind trash or garbage. He doesn't have a violent hate of a candy wrapper in a park, for instance. The IDEA of garbage is not a problem. Waste, on the other hand is, philosophically, repulsive. But the real problem is that waste and garbage are never just the problem in and of themselves. They CREATE problems of their own. An island of garbage is no big deal. But the truth is that it starts a chain reaction that always leads back to people and bites us in the ass. The causality is clear to Oggy. He sees the ultimate effect of these problems and it is all bad.
Maybe the question Oggy would like to ask is this: Can an animal create such a mess that it can't clean it up? Obviously elephants or mice aren't going to clean up our mess. But can mankind clean up our own mess? Oggy doesn't think so, but he also finds it hard to believe what America did in 1941. (Everyone recycled religiously. They even recycled nylon stocking for parachutes! Oggy's neighbors can barely put cardboard in their blue bin and roll it ten feet onto the street. Fucking pathetic!) So Oggy could be wrong. Maybe a collective movement and a brilliant mercury magnet that screened all the mercury from the ocean and a couple big freighters vacuuming the pacific ocean could clean the trash up. And if all the strip mining companies shut down. And all cars ran on hydroelectric-source electricity and were manufactured with recycled steel and plastic...maybe. But there were 3 billion fewer people in 1941. America was so much smaller...but then the internet has allowed information to travel faster. Maybe it's possible. Oggy isn't going anywhere. He might move to Central America or New Mexico or Florida, but he's going to stick around to see if this is possible...or at least watch the ship sink.
posted by Oggy Bleacher | 12:20 AM
