We’re not supposed to be here, like this, we never were supposed to, and now that we are here, none of us really know what we’re supposed to be doing. That’s lost, long gone, so far removed from who we are it’s unattainable. There is no path back to us. We are going to die and the only thing that’s barely possible is not to drag the entire planet down with us. 

We are our own asteroid.

Imagine the fate of trillions of lives, our lives, the lives of plants, animals, insects, fish, whales, birds, bees, snakes, earthworms, all of those lives, everything, depending on some aging white guy somewhere not starting a nuclear war over someone else’s territory. 

That defines who we’ve become, until of course, it doesn’t anymore. But since white people first used nuclear weapons on someone else’s territory, it’s been a constant threat.

Don’t think of the term “white” as a color or a race. Think of it as a culture, a sort of system of values that determines how its members treat the earth. In nearly every town, large and small, all across white culture, the largest structure they have created is a landfill. Their waste is bigger than any building they have erected, it is more massive than any school, any hall of learning, any museum of art or hospital. Their waste is packed into the ground, poured into dying rivers, pumped into the air, and it is so ubiquitous, that no square inch of any human city can be seen without some piece of waste, trash, a cigarette butt, a plastic detritus, or litter on it.  

Unlike cultures from this distant past, whose stone tools and cave painting leave us scant evidence they were here, our existence is going to be a scar, long, deep, colored in the hues of massacre and extinction. But only for a little while longer, until we fling ourselves into the abyss we have worked so hard to create in our own image.