Standing by and seeing our urgent problems but not acting on it is being complicit with whatever you are witnessing that is clearly wrong. Have you made your disappointment and disapproval known? Called your local, state and national representatives? If so, have you heard back? Have you donated money? Did that make a difference?

I’m guessing not. Those reps are receptacles of desires to make the world a better place. That donated money leaves your account in hope of it helping bring about that better world. Good on you! Sit back and wait for better days…

However, at this point keep in mind that you might feel you are taking positive action, but think again. Are you recycling? That’s a feel good, eh? Except 90% of that what goes in that recycle bin ends up in a landfill anyway. Maybe more than 90% Donating money? It left your account, but how is it actually used? Maybe it just pays for a flunky to answer your phone call expressing your being fed-up. Or it is used to buy pizzas for that rep’s staff? You can’t trace that money’s final destination, anymore than the recycle bin’s bounty. Do you donate “gently used clothes”? As with bottles, cans and plastic and paper, the vast majority of those sartorial donations will eventually go on to reside in a landfill. There are documentaries (find them and check out their sources, of course) that reveal these modern-life realities.

Oh, and did I mention plastics up there? By now you may have heard that the oceans are a subterranean junk yard with plastic everywhere. Many fish species have dangerous levels of plastic in them. But avoiding fish won’t help. Find the documentary about micro-plastics being literally in every bit of any food we eat. Or what we imbibe. We all have plastic in our bodies. It is currently literally impossible not to ingest micro-plastics.

However, one possible comforting reality about how your efforts to make the world a better place while countless of your fellow humans, over a century or two, have made it pretty messed up, is that those who ignore your call, waste your well-intended monitary gift, and who may aid and abet the polluting corporations, they are all going down with this now clearly sinking ship. We all have an experation date. You know, this too shall pass. I, personally, would enjoy reading obituaries of any number of people who are making life miserable for those who are wanting to make things better.

Well, of course I am being very darkly ironic. I might still live to know some of those who are complicit will be held to account. But I doubt that. I’m an unrelenting realist. And cursed with critical thinking skills, and thus the ability to recognize a blatant lie from an inference, from a stone-cold fact.

Be one an angel or a demon, we are all complicit in our sad state of current affairs. Of course we are. We are humans. Humans have proven to be a bloody, belligerent species inclined to ultimamtely self-destruct. You may be trying to do the right thing, but we are all guilty by association. Seriously, what other species is so speciously deadly?

I am self-aware of my implicit duplicity in this matter. It’s a raw deal to be born human when your species is trying to kill you for the most innoble reasons. I have personally tried many times to locate the office where I–or anyone–can resign from the human race, but it is nowhere to be found.

Alas.