Dear country...

Dear country,

Now that the election is done, can we please start dealing with the uncomfortable truth that we are destroying the planet? It’s not just us, here in the United States, but we’re definitely a huge part of it.

See, it’s the way we’ve been living and consuming all kinds of stuff—stuff that doesn’t really make us happy, stuff that often makes us less happy, but stuff that certainly makes the planet less happy.

We’ve built cities that require mechanical transportation to get around, and we burn oil to get from place to place.

We make and purchase and use cheaply made products—often not easily recyclable—which fall apart or become “obsolete” when the new version comes out a few years later. So we toss it. We throw it in a bin, put it out on the road where it’s conveniently picked up weekly by a loud, stinky truck.

Meanwhile, our rich people keep getting trickle-up richer, and many of the rest of us keep believing that if we stay in this broken system of ours, we’ll eventually win and be rich ourselves.

We don’t have to be this way. But the thing is, before we can start to make a change, we have to admit that there is a problem. We have to look at ourselves and recognize and say, “Hey this isn’t good, this isn’t healthy, this isn’t sustainable. We have to stop this madness if our children and grandchildren, perhaps even we ourselves, are going to be able to survive on this planet.”

Then we need to make some serious changes. And it would really, really help matters if we had leaders who could admit this stuff to themselves and to us. Leaders who would stop focusing on the election cycle and start doing some real work for the people.

Either that, or somebody needs to invent some magical sci-fi tech and find some other planet where we can relocate. And then we’ll start in raping that planet too.