Feeding the Machine Called Capitalism

Mother Earth responds to recommendations that we abandon social distancing for the sake of the economy.

Today, I just realized why you have treated me the way you have. I guess I always knew, but I couldn’t quite believe it. You all like to talk a lot about how smart you are, convincing yourselves and each other. Maybe I bought into it, too.

But then I heard that man — the one in the place you call Texas — encouraging everyone to end this rest time that you have taken, this “social distancing.”

“No one reached out to me and said, ‘as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”

I wasn’t really sure I had heard him correctly. Forgive me, but I’ve been enjoying this moment of silence — my first in at least a century — and I confess I’m in a bit of a relieved haze right now. But no, I found I had heard him correctly. That those of you who are older should be willing to sacrifice your health — your very lives — in order to save this machine that you call capitalism.

Oh yes, I know what capitalism is. This is the instrument with which you are killing me.

You’ve been holding this knife to my throat for a long time now. Since you built your first factories and began spilling toxic gases into my skies and poisons into my rivers.

It didn’t matter, you’d chuckle to one another, in conspiratorial whispers. Someone else would have to deal with the problem. Someone with less resources than you.

Of course, you strangely didn’t notice that I am a living body, as well. You didn’t notice how you were hurting and killing me along with the people downwind and downriver.

I thought it would end, eventually. You might be able to temporarily buy your way out of the problems you’ve created, but surely you would realize that you were destroying me, and therefore yourselves, at some point. I waited patiently for this as you razed my rainforests to bare earth, as you bled the oil from my veins all too often letting it spill into my oceans.

Yet nothing — absolutely nothing — stopped you.

You are, as you so love to proclaim, the most intelligent species on this planet. I see something very different. I don’t think you know yourselves, at all.

How many species can you name that destroy the one thing that keeps them alive? How many willfully and wantonly poison their own air, contaminate their own water, pollute the soil that feeds them?

You call my other beasts stupid and primitive. You believe my green creatures are insentient.

I do not know whether to laugh or cry at this. You foolish beings...

You can’t stop. You are so desperate to pull out every last drop of my oil that you are now creating fissures beneath your feet — literally destroying the foundation upon which you have built your lives. You keep creating new machines and products that generate more and more single-use plastic, as if you must double your efforts to fill this earth with garbage that will never decompose.

Does it frighten you that the icebergs are melting and some of your most beloved cities will soon be under water? No. Does it frighten you that you have shifted weather patterns in ways that will create droughts, floods, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events that will destroy your homes and kill your loved ones? No. Does it frighten you that up to one million of your sisters and brothers will be extinct within a matter of decades? No.

I couldn’t understand it all until now. Until I heard that man suggest that you sacrifice yourselves for your machine — for capitalism.

People have pretended to be shocked by this, but why? You are already sacrificing yourselves, putting your lives in danger, killing yourselves for your machine. You throw away your coffee cups every single morning, pretending like it doesn’t matter. You drive your cars all over town and you vote for the men who insist that your machine would malfunction if you don’t keep using my blood as your fuel. You pour poisons down your drains and into your lawns.

I admit, though, it did shock me to hear this. I have witnessed your willingness to kill yourselves for the sake of this thing you call “money,” and yet I didn’t really believe how committed you were until now.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not really blaming anyone. I’m just thoroughly and overwhelmingly tired and perplexed. I don’t understand how you got to this point, even though we’ve been traveling this road together since it began.

I guess it started out innocently enough. Like maybe this was a really good idea to create a system in which, theoretically, everyone had access to unlimited abundance if they just worked hard enough. (I’ll try not to bitterly remind you that unlimited abundance so often springs from my body if you had bothered to notice…)

Maybe there is a strange narcotic effect to this promise — that even those of you struggling the most can get there if you can just figure out how to work this machine. Maybe this promise alters your vision, your perception, your understanding of reality.

And I do realize that there are so many of you who see the error of your ways, so many of you who have made changes in your lifestyles in order to lessen your — what do you call it? — carbon footprint. But the machine you made grew and grew, until you lost control of it. Now it controls the entire world. You can’t seem to stop it — not even those of you who so desperately want to.

I wish I could give you comfort in this trying time, but I have none to give. I have been lying here, slowly bleeding out, gasping for breath, for decades. I have begged you to see me. Hear me. Help me. Please.

There is only one way I can offer help or comfort and that is to do what I’ve always done: offer you water, food, air, shade, warmth. But you destroy these gifts, this sustenance, at almost every turn.

What else can I do?

Do not believe those who call me vengeful, who say I will have the “last laugh” when I make my oceans rise to drown you, when I summon the winds and rains to destroy your homes. That is not my doing. Would you call your body vengeful for vomiting when you pour poison down your throat?

I am your body, you see.

You see yourselves as suns, each one of you bigger and brighter than the other, each one of you at the center of your own universe. But in reality, you are cells inside a body that is bigger than anything you can comprehend. Rising oceans, polluted waters, emergency weather conditions…those are merely the body’s attempt to rid itself of the poisons you have poured into it.

There is no vengeance in that. If you think I rejoice in my death throes, you are wrong.

I must admit, though, that this virus that has hurt you has given me a moment of respite. My skies are clearer. My creatures are finding their way back to the places they once frequented. There is rest. There is silence. There is healing.

Should it alarm you that what has brought you to your knees has released me from my chokehold? That my strength is returning as yours diminishes? I would suggest that yes, it should alarm you, but you still aren’t listening. The machine must be fed.

I know there is nothing that I can do to make you hear me. The decades you have spent ignoring me have taught me that.

But just remember one thing: My end will be yours, as well.

Please do not forsake us.

© Yael Wolfe 2020

Read more on this subject by my radiant soul sister, Kaia Tingley 🌀 here, here, and here.

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