Crisis On Just One Earth

There’s no crisis at the Southern border: it’s thousands of miles of sun and dust and occasionally a straggle of the world’s poorest, most powerless human beings. Had they anything of value, they would be in a car or on a plane; they do not, and so they walk across a desert. Their best-case scenario upon reaching the United States is twelve hours a day doing fieldwork, or changing sheets and swopping shit at a Motel 8. Every-other-case scenario involves being raped and murdered.

The climate is a crisis, though. The North Pole is now full of cargo ships and Japanese bathing monkeys, and there is so little ice left that Margarita Monday has been permanently canceled. The storms are stormier, and the droughts are droughtier, and none of the seasons last the right number of weeks any more. The Great Barrier Reef is barely even good. Bees were. We are cooking ourselves in our own juices, Enthusiasts, and that seems like a crisis to me.

Poor fucks in Yemen got nothing to eat, and the poor fucks in Flint got nothing to drink. More slaves today than there were in the 1860’s, but there’s much less Amazon. Weird bastards in hidden labs are teasing apart genomes. The bridges are falling down, but the America’s Cup showed its best time ever; they’re making the sails from carbon fiber nowadays. One might discern a crisis in these facts.

Our rockets are owned by preening dildos, and our jails by oily goons, and our children are blubbery dunces, and there is rat shit in all the food but hopefully not above the acceptable limit. Have you noticed that we keep reminding one another not to suicide? Everyone’s so goddamned sad lately; that must be a crisis.

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”  Thoreau wrote that while he was pretending to be Natty Bumppo in his boyfriend’s backyard. We put the whole world on that telegraph, all of society–the money and the governments and the entertainment and the sex–we translated our lives into a Binary, a language no one understands. Translation isn’t a copy; it’s a whole new ballgame. Grammar is all different, and then you got Quine’s rabbit problem. I’m sure this is no crisis, though, as Anderson Cooper does not seem concerned.

The airports will begin closing soon. The security personnel will not work for free for much longer, and neither will the air traffic controllers. The evictions will start three days after rent is due, because landlords are mostly scum, and those who depended on food stamps for dinner will have empty stomachs. Might not be a crisis to you, and certainly not to the President, but it is for the couple with the hungry kids.

And in the White House, stuffed behind a desk he is not worthy of, is the biggest crisis of them all.