Courtesy of wikipedia.org
When I was a child, I became a vegetarian out of sympathy for animals. Years later, when I was a college freshman, my mother sent me an article about an experiment a scientist performed on tomatoes. When pricked by needles, the fruit trembled. “What are you going to eat now?” my mother wrote in the newspaper’s margin.
We’ve learned more about the plant world since those early days. We know that trees communicate with one another, for example. A Popular Mechanics story reveals other surprises. To keep kudus from overgrazing their leaves, acacia trees in parts of Africa have developed tannins toxic to the animals. When two bean plants send out shoots for the same support, like a stick or a portion of a fence, the second retreats in search of a different anchor. Discoveries like these lead the article’s author to conclude that trillions of conscious beings inhabit the planet.
We’ve also discovered something amazing about ourselves. Scientists have learned that we have more than 5 senses. Most of us have experienced the sixth in a small way. Sometimes we can “feel” when a person is staring at us. But that ability is greater than we surmised. We have a remote touch. In other words, we can detect buried objects with 70% accuracy, a talent that scientists speculate allows us to be more in tune with our surroundings.
The more we learn about ourselves and the planet, the more we discover that Nature strives for balance among life forms. A handicap for humans is that desire can grapple with our instincts. We can become greedy and unwilling to share. As a result, we have given little thought to the needs of other species and have plundered the planet’s resources to near exhaustion. Few would deny that climate change is the result of human activities.
Some species will adapt to the changes we have wrought. Others will disappear, possibly humans among them.
Sigmund Freud believed that homo sapiens harbored a death wish, a subconscious longing to return to an inorganic state, one which finds its expression through aggression. Violence, he argued, was the outward manifestation of the inward willingness to destroy connections and disrupt stability.
What would he make of the turmoil in our society today? Could we be on the brink of oblivion?
The future lies in our hands, of course. Yet, I do wonder whether the super-rich and the ruling political elites are blind to the shadow of change on the horizon. James Carville, a political pundit, complains about the recent New York primary in which three newcomers defeated longtime Democratic incumbents. He calls the winners socialists who should create their own party.
Carville would do well to worry less about parsing the word “Democrat” and more about 45% of voters who belong to neither party. That percentage reflects a growing number of citizens who see that money talks and that the country is morphing into an oligarchy.
Ironically, the oligarchs among us, men and women who consider themselves to be among the best and brightest, do not know what the bean sprout knows. Restraint is necessary for a system to survive. Yet, contrary to the instincts Nature has provided, these gluttons of wealth continue to pursue money and power as if there were no limits. Desecrating the planet and leaving little for anyone else, they will not stop until the world’s richest man is willing to kill the world’s poorest children.
Nowhere in the universe does an imbalance sustain itself. Imbalance gives way to change. What Carville sees as the roof collapsing on the Democratic Party is the people’s reaction to an unresponsive system. Workers are exhausted by the greed of the privileged. They are tired of “trickle-down” theories about shared wealth, tired of being betrayed by false champions like Donald Trump.
At the beginning of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine roused the oppressed colonists to seek their freedom with the promise that they could “begin the world again.” (Thomas Paine’s Fight,” by John Nichols, The Nation, July/August 2026, pg. 6.) Many are reawakening to that promise today. I doubt the dog whistles of the past–socialist, communist, and radical– will lessen ordinary people’s demand for basic human rights. Put more simply, they are tired of the bullshit.
BOYCOTT: Tesla, Apple, Amazon
