BY GARY JOHNSON
Reprinted from Loose Change (TCBMag.com) 

“We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon, and we got to get ourselves back to the garden.” — Joni Mitchell

When I was in second grade, the ancient monsignor who ran our parish died. He was a player, having managed the seat of the bishopric for decades, the former Papal Chamberlain and right reverend from “Baaahstun,” Monsignor William L. Mulloney. When he kicked, the nuns of the parish draped the cathedral in black crepe. A Requiem High Mass was celebrated by the bishop, a special service performed exclusively for the students of St. Joseph’s Cathedral grade and high school. The wee ones were required to processional up to the open casket at the foot of the high altar in the heavily incensed, darkly lit cathedral as funereal dirges droned from the formidable pipes and organ donated by the good monsignor’s Brahmin family.

We circled around the casket enabling a 200x zoom-shot of the body—a breath-catching moment as smothering as Aunt Betty burying my face in her considerable bosom on

visits to Grandma’s house. In those days, dead prelates of high rank were left lying in state for a full week, their flower-drowned casket open under a 24/7 spotlight in an otherwise dark and quiet church. Holy Febreze. For this 7-year-old, it was like walking into a freaky Vincent Price movie.

In his marvelous and recent essay, “Memento Mori,” former editor of Harper’s magazine and doctor of thinkology, Lewis Lapham, riffed on the vagaries of buying the farm. At near 80, he penned a predictable paen to his mortal coil slippage. His central point, ala the ancient Bhagavad Gita as pointed out by my friend Ted, that getting cozy with the notion of splitting the popstand can and should have a profound effect on how one lives one’s life. “Memento mori” was the phrase whispered by a servant in the ear of triumphant Roman generals as they drove their chariots through the streets of Rome. The platitude, “Remember you will die,” is one of many ubiquitous carpe diem-style bromides we conveniently ignore until the motivational duress of aging sets in, that time when the probability of popping one’s clogs increases with each breath, or shall we say, lack thereof.

Lapham opens his essay with a great line from Woody Allen about death: “I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Ultimately though, the self–absorption of Lapham’s age-stage serves to overshadow the ginormous elephant in the room, i.e., whither the young, whose memento mori isn’t actuarial, but environmental? The prospect of death to an 80-year-old seems entirely natural to opine upon, but for the 20-, 30-, or 40-somethings facing what appears to be the inevitable destruction of their world, philosophizing does little to quell the rage, much less provide solace or acceptance.

Consider being on the front end of an anticipated fruitful and rich life only to discover that the physical world upon which you will rely has been so severely f****d up by previous generations that, short of a transformative solution on the scale of The Creation, it is irretrievably unfixable. The thought makes me want to run around hysterically, like North Carolina State coach Jim Valvano at the end of the 1983 NCAA basketball championship, desperately seeking someone to hug. The difference being: I’d be looking for someone to hit.

My friend Dick, who ran (for fun) behind trucks spraying clouds of DDT to kill mosquitoes over 50 years ago, sent me an op-ed from the New York Times lamenting our impending deaths in the coming century due to climate disasters, exponentially exacerbated by infrastructural failings. That fate, testified true-blue countless times by studies, scientists, and piles of data, smacks of the scene from Ghostbusters, where Egon and Venkman riff, “This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions . . . Old Testament, real wrath-of-God type stuff . . . fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, rivers and seas boiling . . . 40 years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together . . . mass hysteria.” After watching the recent floods and typhoon destruction in Colorado, Singapore, and the Philippines, as well as the multiplicity of tornadoes in the central United States last summer, that screen-written apocalypse could easily be the forecast on the Weather Channel in another 25 years.

Have I lost you yet? My guess is that the climate-change deniers, cockeyed optimists, and smiley faces have opted out. As the Man in Black said in Princess Bride, “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” So, who’re you buying your snake oil from these days?

And whom shall we hang by their toes for the rape and murder of Mother Nature? There was a time when clever American entrepreneurs felt the need to dominate and wrest control of nature from the good Mother. They proceeded to build machines belching horrendous oxygen-killing smoke, they invented chemicals that wreaked havoc on people and the food chain, they mesmerized our increasingly overpopulated and naïve citizenry with the wonders of air conditioning, coal, and petroleum, fast cars, aerosol spray, and the trappings of the good life, sold with wild doses of enthusiasm and bought like kittens lapping up milk on the back porch.

In the end we fell hook, line, and sinker for The Life, the much-ballyhooed American dream, the lure of Progress—a euphemism for big-time wealth. And man alive, did people get wealthy! But how’s that working for y’all, or better yet, for your grandchildren? Ninety-nine percent of the wealth is held by a tiny number of people, and our children’s children are left with the bleakest of prospects. Indeed, we’ve earned the decidedly dubious distinction of being named after a new geologic era, The Anthropocene, i.e., that period in which humans, mostly men, completely screwed our planet over to the point of certain catastrophe, barring a technological miracle or a return visit from the Blessed Virgin at Fatima with instructions for what to do next.

Dour. Morose. Cynical. Negative? Perhaps. After all, the skies are still blue, the water rife with fish, the land tillable, modern conveniences abound, technology is the eighth wonder of the world, and those climate fanatics haven’t proven a thing. Right? For Lewis Lapham, not a problem. On the other hand, I’d hate to be his grandchildren.

I prefer to think of climate change as the real original sin. Eve chomping on a Honeycrisp is peanuts compared to what we’ve done to God’s creation. We’re about to be purged from the garden, robbed of the beauty we were handed. Beauty is what separates us from our worst inclinations; it is ultimately our saving grace and it is a gift, regardless of what your cheap theory is on whomever threw this world together. And yet we piss it down our leg with every breath we are fortunate enough to be able to take. It’s astonishing. When does the loss of the biologic miracle we walk around in each day drive us to slam on the brakes?

Even if it is too late.

Editor’s Note: Gary Johnson is President of MSP Communications in Minneapolis, MN and authors the blog Loose Change for TCBmag.com.