Thursday Morning Rant Against Cant

Art: Landscape of Change, by Jill Pelto

Look at the trillions of dollars our leaders can, all of a sudden, find to spend shoring up the economies now under threat because of an organic event that disrupts all that we had been told was so robust. Look at these trillions! It's right to spend to save jobs and lives, of course. But in this sudden, fearful, desperate profligacy, the bankruptcy (the hypocrisy) of conservative arguments for thrift, and against spending on what always really counts, is laid bare.

We have, it turns out, mountains of money; we've been hoarding it like toilet paper and pasta; and we might have used to properly pay, among others, teachers and poets and artists, who are asked to survive on starvation rations, and whose work could make us wiser and more grateful for the miracle we inhabit, and smarter at keeping the real estate—the living world—wealthy; and we might have spent some of these trillions, could we not, had we the imagination and the courage, growing a green economy and conserving well what's left of the natural world we so savage, and thus staving off the worst of the real catastrophe we already inhabit—the warming of the planet, the wilding of the weather, the acidification of the seas, the corruption of our very values and the way we speak them.

 "There is always a certain meanness in the arguments of the conservatives," wrote Emerson. Well, one always knew that. But it's worse. There's hypocrisy, too. Turns out we can afford whatever it costs; turns out we can find the dollars—for everything but justice and beauty and wisdom and the survival of the earth. We don't lack funds. The treasurers have lied. We lack imagination; we lack generosity of spirit, largeness of mind. We live and act from fear, not love, and so the panic spreads, where beauty might. Where forests might. Where seas might still run, in which the fish can escape the plastic, in which the corals might still grow.