Dear Editor:
Two letters in Thursday’s Advance, “Hoi Polloi will be left” and “Science says oil is killing”, both excellent in attempts to assess underlying truth about pollution and abdication of responsibility in the present, need a rebuttal, but one that is also an agreement.
I’m a 71-year-old with enough energy and smarts to hang with the best and I have a view to share.
Never in history has the world had it presented so convincingly that we are all citizens of earth.
When a backpack bomber sets himself off in a crowded marketplace in the Far East or a maniac drives a van into a crowd of people in Toronto, we know of it and are saddened by it within minutes.
The world is crying, screaming out for intelligent and even-handed approaches to fixing what’s most wrong. Political systems and the criminality they breed, multi-nationals who only care for the formerly innocuous shareholder, organized religion, media proponents of control and those who hold onto outmoded concepts of what makes any society worthwhile – all of these are in some form of death throes. Sadly, it may take decades before they pass, but pass they will.
It’s neither positive nor perceptive to think of planet earth as apart from our very selves. Everything is a part of us and we are a part of everything, and it’s been that way since the Big Bang. If we pollute the planet, we pollute ourselves. When we do something about it instead of complain, the planet does something for itself. We are truly made of the same ingredients.
To quote the great Robbie Burns, “The best laid plans of mice and men…” meaning no matter how carefully a project is planned, something will go wrong. This also goes for the insane of the world who would see it destroyed. The Trumps, lumps and grumps of the world will pass. and the world will still be here, tended by those who have grown up in a knowledge-based world and not a world predicated upon gender, race, religion, inherited wealth or blind luck.
Eli Bryan Nelson, Langley City