Nuance 13

I am an optimist. I can't help it. I don't think it's just in my nature, though this does seem hardwired into me. How odd, that I just switched on the CBC and there is an interview with historian Margaret McMillan who is saying that with the current concentrations of power in the world that there is a lot to be pessimistic about in the world. I suppose she's right. But this doesn't quite resonate with me. Perhaps because we've always got through all the catastrophes and disasters that have confronted us throughout history? As I mentioned to a friend yesterday, we have always gone through bad and worse. They have found that just over seventy thousand years ago, environmental disasters had reduced the human species to some two hundred persons all over the world, and they are all our ancestors now. Then there wss that last and particularly disastrous ice age. I really don't know. Or maybe we're the cat that has just been granted his ninth and final life? I have long thought of dispair as a luxury I cannot afford. I suppose this also runs with my personal experience in life. I have known my share of disasters and collapses, have somehow muddled or struggled through and have always come out okay, if perhaps a little bit bruised. I have certainly had to be creative with my coping strategies and solutions. This reminds me of an argument I had with my psychiatrist some fourteen or fifteen years ago. He tried to dish me a bunch of Freudian crap about defense mechanisms. I simply shot back that every one of the things about which he was trying to pathologize me were coping strategies, and nothing else. I was thoroughyly conscious and in control of what I was doing and the strategies worked. He ended up agreeing. Collectively, we are going to get through this current batch of crises. We always have. If we can stop being so stupid and selfish, that is, and here is where my optimism is always challenged and then I begin to teeter towards dispair. It doesn't take much. For example, I was listening to Spark, a program on CBC Radio One about how cattle ranchers in Alberta's use of high tech has been ruling out the necessity of branding calves. Now, they were mentioning this purely from a pragmatic perspective, as well that by not branding the calves, they tend to gain more weight and produce a better quality of meat. Absolutely nothing was said about branding being one less torturous cruelty that their animals were being subjected to. As if the wellbeing of their livestock would matter not a damn, simply their profitability. Well, of course. And probably those would be among the same Albertans who want pipelines and the oil industry to flourish, even as the future of this planet is being held hostage on a craps game. And those same, selfish, callous but pragmatic Albertans are not the exception. They are sadly and oh so very typical of the kind of peopke who populate this earth. The same folks who badmouth people like me as freaks and radicals. Fair enough, but those are still stereotypes, and one to one, I am not convinced that they are going to be so universally odious. Nobody is. This is an uphill climb, and it is a matter of time before we can really know where we are going with all these changes that are hanging over us. Perhaps it is also because I always believe that good will out, no matter how bad it gets. But hasn't it always, Gentle Reader? Eventually?