So tired of it all, all the endless “debate” and confusion and angst about this current Covid crisis. It’s making me dizzy. 

It’s real, and we are dealing with it I guess best we can…or not. And it will play itself out as it will, in spite of how bogged down we are in all the confusions and all these competing theories and all the varied and disparate solutions surrounding this real yet unreal crisis. We’re all enmeshed in the tertiary branches of this unfolding saga of chaos and confusion, which is understandable, yet we also need to think about the deeper existential crisis facing us, and try going to some of the roots of our obvious dysfunctionalities as a society and as a species.  The real crisis, beneath the surface of this one, seems to me to be how we have given up our authority to think and feel for ourselves and tap into our own inner wisdoms about life, from which come simple revelations and even simpler answers. We are totally alienated from our connection to life and nature. We are living in a closed system of human alienation from the Earth, stuck in the prison of our out-of-control brains disconnected from the simplicity and wisdom of our hearts. Mind informing heart instead of heart informing mind.

And within that disconnect, we have become, as a collective, lost in space and swirling in a tower of babble, now in its current iteration over this virus. But it’s been going on for at least 10,000 years, this babble and disconnect, ever since we stopped being humble mammals on this Earth, and decided to leave nature and subdue, commodify, and dominate “it”, and our fellow animal beings whom we have recast as “its”. 

“It” “worked, for thousands of years, while we always had new frontiers to exploit, whether of other lands, other peoples, or other fellow animal beings, and we could always export our war on life, and import the spoils. And we are now so disconnected from our hearts, and our immediate sensibilities, that we do not even notice, or care about, the ravages in our wake, or that we slaughter over 70 billion fellow animals per year, over 150 million every hour, and trillions of marine beings, for mere titillation of the taste bud. And yet we tell ourselves, in an ultimate of conceit and arrogance, that we are oh-so-kind and caring. As we willfully continue our assault on life, and remain steeped in our prevarications when the Earth and the animals, and now a Covid, ask “What are you doing!?”

But now we have run out of new worlds and new victims to oppress. And it is now coming full circle and closing in on us. Like an organism that has walled itself off from its natural input-throughput relationship to the greater sustaining whole, and begins feeding on itself with a cancer of dis-ease, and in a pilot’s death-spiral, mired in a delusion and an illusion of an altitude of superiority, all the while steering ourselves, in an increasingly rapid descent, toward inevitable annihilation of both self and the mountain.

And on the way to that, we have all manner of self-made crises — coronavirus, climate chaos, species extinction, massive biodiversity loss, looming ecosystems collapse, world hunger, resource wars, ocean death…and on and on and on, while we fiddle and quibble.

What’s the underlying cause of it all? Connect all the dots and we can easily see that it is our arrogant sense of superiority, our hierarchical thinking, and our other-ization of those we perceive to be “lower” than us, who we can then objectify and commodify. Stripped of their personhood, we close them off from our hearts and from any consideration of their sovereign and sacred interests.  

It starts with fellow animal beings we so easily brutalize, and moves on to the Earth “it”self, in a wanton assault to serve our misperceived needs. And it then extends into our human realm, with all manner of injustices heaped upon those we perceive as of lesser “value”. And then it all comes full circle back to us, living in a world of massive injustice and misery and stress and chaos, and existential angst that seeps into our very souls.

Look closely and you will see that everything we have done to the outside world comes back to us and becomes externalized and internalized in our own collective and individual worlds. The suffering and misery and chaos we sow returns to us. And still we twiddle and quibble.  

Bottom line, all the looming crises and issues and problems we see and fret about, and protest and rail about in a sinking futility stem from one source: Our massive failure of heart and compassion toward the “other”, and a refusal to see and feel how the “other” is us, and one and the same.

We talk about humanity being “one big family” but we don’t really believe that or feel that. We talk about having respect for the Earth and fellow animals, and we doubly do not really believe or feel that, and we wage war on both, and then war on each other in a reap of our disconnect.  

Then we say, we must solve human issues first. But that is upside down thinking. “As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields” (Tolstoy). It must start there. We will never have peace and harmony in the human realm as long as we massively violate the laws of peace and harmony by brutalizing our fellows. And it then becomes, by simple extension of that mindset and heart-set, easy to brutalize and exploit our fellows that are human animals, and our fellow Earth.

As we have seen and experienced now for eons, all our talk and “efforts” of “peace” and “justice” has only amounted to an ever-increasing babble of lament over the failures of same. Perhaps it is time to recognize that our humanocentric approach to life and problems IS the problem in the first place. An approach borne of self-consumed selfishness. “Remote from universal nature”, it can only feed upon itself, and its host. Perhaps it is time to flip the script upside down.  

The slogan “Earth First!” meant something, and something deep. As in a family, altruism is what gives life and sustains the life of the family. “For it is a giving without hope of getting” (Cross). Yet the giving returns the getting 10-fold. It’s the magic of it, in a beautiful revelation of the wisdom of life itself. All it takes is a leap of faith into it. No babble needed.

Fellow animals and the Earth first? Compassion and altruism just might do the trick, where singular human-centered selfishness has failed, throughout all these ages of futility, now closing in on us and the world.

So here we are, caught up in the next virus of our selfishness of insensitivity, and the beat goes on.  

This coronavirus is just the babble of a perversion of another word of exactly the same letters — CARNIVOROUS — now scrambled into a prevarication of the truth that is right in front of us and that has been calling to us for so long now. We are all one. What we do to our fellow animals and the Earth is what we invariably end up doing to ourselves. Sow destruction and misery and murder, and, by the natural laws of life, it returns to us with a proper vengeance, 10-fold in a reverse terribleness of a wisdom we have forsaken.  

The current coronavirus is real. Yet it is just a concretization of something far deeper, and a manifestation of something far more vile. We can hammer away at that concrete, as we are doing, but all it is doing is creating a rubble we will stumble over and then rebuild with brick and mortar into the next monolith of our myopic mindlessness and ruthless heartlessness. Wake up, humans. What we sow we reap. And then what we reap we sow again, ad infinitum. We must stop railing against the reap while ignoring the sow.

And we have to stop making this so complicated. Want to end resource wars, stop climate change, end world hunger, avoid these zoonotic viruses, heal our Earth, create a healthy and just society, save fellow animals from our brutality, and heal our spiritual malaise? Just go vegan now — dietarily, ethically, environmentally, and justly. The rest will naturally take care of itself. Nothing short of that will ever bring peace and harmony to our world. Or end the babble of our discontent.  

—  Jack McMillan. Founding board member, Cleveland Vegan Society.

Banner photo: Adam Nieścioruk, via Unsplash.