Fire God

Biking through my neighborhood on a sunny morning. The sun feels good, though the air is very cold, about 10 degrees. I weave in and out the peaked shadows of houses, through shadowed webs of tree branches and telephone poles, contemplating mortality, the dragon, the fire god, and my species head long rush toward oblivion.

Any one man could bring down any one of the big banks from within, quite easily. Shut down all activity associated with the bank for days, maybe weeks, costing the economy tens, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars. Of course, they would get the bank running again, and the hacker would spend the rest of his life in a cage while society debated the merits of his action, while the banks continued to centralize economic control. It would serve no purpose at all but statement. You aren't going to end the worship of the Market and the poisoning of the Earth by temporarily disabling a bank.

The sun, however, could wipe out banking worldwide, in a moment. We are heading into what is know as a solar maximum, the peak in the cyclical eleven year ebb and flow of sunspots. Sun spots are magnetic storms that periodically unleash Coronal Mass Ejections (CME), energetic solar wind which sometimes collides with the Earth. Our atmosphere generally channels this energy toward the poles, causing the northern lights, that energy then funneled into the Earth. Occasionally, the solar wind is so powerful it can disrupt communications, fry electrical stations, even knock satellites out of commission. We know the sun is capable of CME's that could wipe out satellites globally, even disable the electrical grid of whole continents. In the dark, in a moment, indefinitely.

It is also true the Earth has been hit by interstellar debris so large it initiated tectonic activity world-wide, dust and ash clouding the sky for years, causing mass specie extinction. The Earth alone is capable of such devastation - the Toba supervolcano eruption 75,000 years ago led to climate change so severe, some believe it was the near extinction of Homo sapien sapien. Yellowstone has that same potential.

The WikiLeaks dispersal of sensitive US diplomatic cables largely reveals that people act well, and people act badly, even among sky gods, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate a political realm where increasing numbers of people are capable of initiating global, thermo-nuclear devastation. Thank you, Juilan Assange et al. I am so looking joyward to the release of sensitive Bank of America memos.

Sitting in my sun room, the sun on my face making vitamin D, my hair standing on end as I contemplate a nuclear Iran, with their Ayatollahs and their militant jihadist hatred of Israel and the West; Kim Jong-il and his prickly man/child successor son; rogue Islamist Talibanic nutjobs in the Pakistani military; end-times advocates in Israel. The world is increasingly volatile and the great global Market churns away blissfully oblivious to its affect, exacerbating the volatility - and I am so angry and so tired of being angry, the way we are courting this revenge of the fire god. The way we poison the Earth and ourselves and then wonder why the world is such a mess.

My friend Snake thinks we don't think enough about death. That's about right. If we think about death at all, we think about how to avoid it. Which may seem practical, but in fact it only exacerbates the probability of death on a grand, even epic scale. Seven billion Homo sapien sapien finding ever more creative ways to kill each other, in the name of staying alive, to take over the world. Or in the case of suicide bombers, giving up on the instinct to survive, entirely.

God and Goddess have nothing to do with it, except insofar as they are used, God in particular, to justify the use of violence, the act of destruction, the accumulation of vast resources and the power that is associated with such control.

Death? I am going to die. I have no desire to avoid it. But I can tell you, whether it be fire from the sky, fire from the sun, fire from the Earth, fire from Homo sapien sapien, I will endeavor to survive. I will help others survive. If I do not first destroy myself with my anger.

And why am I so angry? Because this Earth is a wonderful and blessed, beautiful garden, and my species is destroying it.