The Reading of the Will

From Deep Ecology: The Ecological Self on Joanna Macy's site
an excerpt from the section on Deep Time:

...our true regard for beings of the future is portrayed in a recent cartoon by Tom Toles of the Buffalo News. To a group sitting before him expectantly, a lawyer is reading a will. It says:

Dear Kids,

We, the generation in power since WWII, seem to have used up pretty much everything ourselves. We kind of drained all the resources out of our manufacturing industries, so there’s not much left there. The beautiful old buildings that were built to last for centuries, we tore down and replaced with characterless but inexpensive structures, and you can have them. Except everything we built has a lifespan about the same as ours so, like the interstate highway system we built, they’re all falling apart now and you’ll have to deal with that. We used up as much of our natural resources as we could, without providing for renewable ones, so you’re probably only good until about a week from Thursday. We did build a generous Social Security and pension system, but that was just for us. In fact, the only really durable thing we built was toxic dumps. You can have those. So think of your inheritance as a challenge. The challenge of starting from scratch. You can begin as soon as – oh, one last thing – as soon as you pay off the two trillion dollar debt we left you.

What is staggering about this cartoon, to the point of being funny, is not any exaggeration, for there is none, but the sheer enormity of the reality it portrays and our apparent insouciance in the face of it. This state of affairs can be approached, of course, from a moralistic perspective, in terms of the selfishness of our generation. But I find it more helpful to understand it in terms of our experience of time, for it reveals a blindness, a pathetically shrunken sense of time, that amounts to a pathological denial of the reality and ongoingness of time.

time keeps on slippin, slippin, slippin
into the future

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