May 30^th, 2008

Hold the key in our hands
We hold the key
The key is held
Held is the key

-Rejected lyrics from a song I am currently working on (no, I wasn't serious when I wrote those)

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I gotta tell you: We are pretty seriously screwed by our own White Man's Guilt. Just about everything we (White Men) do seems to be some sort of reaction to quiet meta-messages that make us dance (out of guilt) or a direct result of guilt from how we feel about ourselves, how we feel about ... oh, I guess our mothers, spouses or partners, bosses or teachers, and even siblings probably.

But, because we have these little pain points that the weasels among us can detect (either directly if they are smart, or by instinct if they are just nasty dumb-asses), we are subject to—nay, vulnerable to—their manipulations of our guilt for their gains.

The New Church of Environmentalism is one such example. Actually, that one is an entire class of examples. Here is our White Man's Guilt about it in a nutshell:

Oh man, am I ever a big fat SUV-driving over-user of resources who not only destroys 37 times my body weight in resources that I could be conserving instead of eroding the fragile Earth's environment with, I am growing sick and weak because of it.

I realise not everyone feels this way. And I further realise that even those who do feel this way might not feel it so acutely and harshly as I have written it here. But to some extent, every White Man feels at least a little of it.

And to assuage our guilt, we have started down the road to some pretty ridiculous lengths that only serve to line the pockets of the people who don't care at all about our withering environment.

• Marketing efforts start with the idea: "How do we sell this [crap]?" They stand around for a while, some intern runs off and comes up with a few ideas, then it hits them: "Of course! We'll market it as a 'green' solution!" Example: Some detergent company or another has made its detergent "more concentrated" but sells half as much. Of course, it doesn't cost half as much for the consumer! Then they sell it as a 'green' solution: Less plastic in the bottle (smaller bottle, see) ... erm ... less water to produce it, I suppose ... um ... that's all I can think of. And everybody knows that we all put the same-sized squirt of detergent into our laundry no matter how concentrated it is. So, if everybody uses the same careless squirt as always, that company has just sold us less product for the same price, and tried to make themselves smell oh-so-sweet in the process.
• Or how about this rather nebulous and vaguely-executed notion of carbon offsets: Basically, buy your way to heaven. Um ... except people will gladly take your money and spend -er- only some of it burying carbon in the ground. (By the way, burying it is not nearly as dreadful and desperate as it sounds; we extracted oil out of the ground, might as well put some of its by-products back.) But while we are perfectly happy to pay off these people to offset some carbon for us (which, I know, does not mean burying it all under a mountain), we aren't really all that interested in following up afterwards to ensure our money went where we thought it should—after all, what would we do and how would we feel when we discovered that we were unloading our White Western guilt (in the form of money) onto a pointless, badly-carried-out plan?
• There's also just the plain old Hypocrites: They espouse loud and long the clarion call of how we must all make tiny sacrifices to the Great God of Environmental Decay while they smirk and do nothing themselves. How to raise your relative quality of life:
  • Traditional way: Raise your own income/status/station
  • New Church of Environmentalism way: Lower everyone else's through lip service to sacrifice (while maintaining your own)

I could go on, but I think I've made my point. All the way down, all from the marginally-honest to the outright cheaters know we feel guilty, and are happy to present their costly ideas as a way for us to alleviate that guilt.

I guess I need to make one last point: Though people may think so, I am not denying that this planet's environment is changing. And I am further not denying that the responsibility for it lies with humans—fully or partially. I am just pointing out that, in our environmental crisis, we are susceptible to being duped by charlatans if we succumb to feeling guilty about what is happening. I personally think that if we want to do something about it, we need to dispassionately analyze what is needed to stop it ... and then just do it. It's amazing how difficult those simple paths are for us to follow, isn't it?

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