So this is March 3, 2009, and I am so into winter hibernation, that even though I made myself go to town today, it wasn't for long, and I had trouble caring at all about the mundane chores of shopping, mailing out bills, etc.  Took that nice bag of stuff over to Good Will and dropped it off. 

I seem to be focused on an otherworldly overview of life in general.  It was just this winter that I began to read books about the Amazon, and now I've been watching the television show "Mark and Ollie with the Machigenga," a tribe living in Peru.  It did hit me hard that the same exploitation, genocide and slavery of the native peoples is taking place right now, at this very moment in our time of living here on this planet.  And I didn't know a thing about it until this winter.  I didn't even know that rubber trees grew in South America, originally.  I always thought they grew in Southeast Asia, according to the song "oops, there goes another rubber tree plant."    And then an email today from one of the environmental groups I belong to tells of the euthanasia of perhaps the last free jaguar in the United States, due to kidney failure.  A sad time for the world. 

And what can we do?  I have visions of a nice big helicopter lift of a big bag of raw crude petroleum being dumped in and around the President of Arco's swimming pool, contaminating his house and yard and poisoning his children, ruining life for him.  But that is not only impossible, it wouldn't be helpful.  Was I living in Paradise, not knowing what big business is doing to people and land in other places?  Loving my automobile?  I was permanently p.o'd at big oil when they assassinated the duly elected President of Iran back in the 1950's, and all the oilmen could say is "We do it all for you, the American people." 

But I also recall going across the lake in my round-bottomed rowboat to Frenchie's resort, a native American, to see about getting a job there as a baby-sitter for vacationing tourists who rented out his cabins on the lake.  He had a sheet of glass on the countertop with all the business cards of everyone who had ever come and stayed there.  There were probably more than 50 business cards under the glass.  I asked him why he kept them there, and he said it was a reminder that every single one of them is a polluter of the environment.  I was amazed, and pointing to one after another, he told me what they did, at the very minimum, to pollute.  I came away dispirited by the knowlege that our entire way of life must be wrong. 

Apparently, I'd come to accept that and go on with life; I realize that we are living in the age of the oil dinosaur, a huge tyrranosaurus rex, and on an individual level, I still need a vehicle to get around in.  I wonder what life is like on other planets...  Is there no way to avoid being like this, living with guilt and shame for what we have all done and continue to do every day?