Doomsday, Demo Day: Nature Always Wins

             Demo Day, Chip Gaines crows, flexing his biceps, brandishing his mallet. Joanna, his wife, giggles as he throws himself crashing through drywall, rips down kitchen cabinets, saws through beams.  Crowbars, jackhammers, high-pressure hoses, muscle. Joanna calls it “getting back to the roots.”  It is breaking down walls, exposing toxic mold and termite-ridden beams.  We're tuned into another episode of HGTV’s Fixer Upper, a program devoted to turning moldering houses into homes with chi. In the next hour, we will watch a crew transform a ramshackle hut into a charming cottage; last week, a moldering Victorian was reborn as a lively inn.

            Like a condemned house, the earth is riddled with disease: air, water, and soil pollution; the amputation of beneficial botanical and zoological species; chemically poisoned fields; the unbalancing of natural processes; global warming and the gout of swelling seas. 

In their study of generational patterns most famously described in The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, William Strauss and Neil Howe argue that human history runs in cycles of roughly eighty years: The High, The Awakening, The Unraveling, The Crisis.  In 1997, they predicted that 2020 would bring us to The Crisis: someone of the boomer generation would rise to power and precipitate disasters that millennials would have to redress.  Steve Bannon distorted the generational patterns described in The Fourth Turning to strategize just such a fascistic (down)turn in America.  That included the elimination of Environmental Protection measures and the support of industries destructive of global ecology—all in the name of greed and political power.  We are on a trajectory to Doomsday. 

And Nature has declared Demo Day.  She is roaring in thunder, tornadoes, the racket of hailstorms. Flexing her muscles with hurricanes, firestorms, cyclones. She rips up houses, cars, roads, power plants, and dams. Reduces winters that check algae so lakes will sicken. Brings on droughts and floods.  Power outs?  Yes, Power outs. Ebola, SARS, MRSA? Hm. Humans kept those in check through responsible government. But moldy wallpaper, flaking asbestos, and rotten foundations have to be eliminated to make a home. So, too, with humans. Let those befuddled by artificially processed sugars, drugs, alcohol, food; screens, amps, gadgets, backfiring trucks—suffer the consequences. Let them elect narcissistic, brain-damaged, fascistic heads of state, too distracted with popularity to act for the common good. These leaders are the high-pressure hoses, Nature’s jacking hammers yammering, so to speak. Well done: the lemmings are meeting in Petri dishes—megachurches, rallies, parades.

And now, the fever: COVID-19—a burning out of the most invasive and destructive species on earth.  Let these humans destroy themselves and each other.  Let’s return to solid foundations, the seasoned beams, ancient rocks.  Sadly, some antique mirrors will break, some houses will succumb to the wrecker’s ball. Innocent bystanders? Who among us is not complicitous?

Go to Your Room, Nature says, Build your ark.  I’m cleaning up.

Works Cited:

Strauss, William, and Neil Howe.  The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy—What the

Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny. New York:

Three Rivers P, 1997.