Always Too Late

German bank robbers miscalculate
explosives to blow open door,
destroy the entire building.

How is it that we here in the United States are virtually always late when it comes to disasters or other problems? And if we are not too late we are almost always almost too late. We were, for example, too late to save the Passenger Pigeons, and almost too late to save the Buffalo. Now we are either too late or almost too late to save many other species, the pygmy rabbits, the salmon, the burbot, the sturgeon, and on and on. We seem to be perennially too late to stop bad drugs from making it onto the market, waiting until many people have ill effects before taking action. We were too late in entering WW II, and would have been way too late had Roosevelt not acted when he did. We were too late in Korea and Vietnam where much of the tragedy could have been avoided or at least moderated. We were too late in confronting Joe McCarthy and his witch hunts that ruined the lives of many completely innocent people, often writers, actors, and University Professors. Of course we were too late to deal effectively with Katrina, too late to build adequate dikes, too late to provide aid and comfort, just too late as always. Now we are too late to deal with the BP disaster. Even if the well is shut down it is well after the proverbial horse is out of the barn, with millions of gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf and now into the marshes where it can never be cleaned up. And it may be much worse before it is over. This is something that could have been prevented, just as many other things could be prevented if we had the foresight to pay attention to what is about to happen before it happens. And we don’t seem to learn from experience. People in power are still talking about and preparing for more offshore drilling even though it should certainly be obvious by now that deep-water drilling is little more than a gamble and we are not really prepared to deal with potential problems. The people who are insisting we continue say we desperately need the oil, but the amount of oil we produce is really quite minimum compared to what we waste on a daily basis.

Anyway, there seems to be something about Americans that makes us do things before we carefully consider all the potential consequences, a kind of recklessness like the “shoot first and ask questions later,” attitude that goes along with the romantic myths of our frontier and western past. We seem to be more willing to take risks than many other people. In some parts of the world if there is a potential dangerous risk in doing something it is avoided until all possibilities outcomes are considered. Even in the New Guinea Highlands when I worked there the so-called “primitive people” were more adverse to risk than we are. When Tilapia were introduced, for example, to provide a much needed source of protein for them, they refused to eat them because, they said, “the little bones might get in the throats of our children.” A visitor from Africa is reported to have responded in astonishment that anyone would buy and eat a chicken when they did not know who raised it and where it came from. We continue to use certain drugs and chemicals even though we know they have been banned in other countries. The crap they have been spraying on the oil is a case in point, it is illegal in England. Is this some kind of character flaw in the American character, or is there perhaps another explanation? It probably has to do with our reckless approach to our economy where many want everything privatized, energy, transportation, medical care, agriculture, even social security (if they could) with no apparent realization that some things are far too important to be privatized and the consequences of privatization are actually quite harmful to the citizenry. So, in our endless pursuit of profit through unregulated capitalism we drill for oil where we don’t know what we are doing, we remove entire mountain tops in pursuit of coal and push the waste and debris into our rivers, rivers which are themselves polluted with mercury and worse, we practice corporate farming even though we know it is harmful to the earth, build dams without foresight enough to think of the fish, and allow species to disappear without knowing what possible benefits might accrue by not allowing them to go extinct. In short, we act stupidly and without sufficient foresight, and we do it over and over again.

LKBIQ:
“The white men were many and we could not hold our own with them. We were like deer. They were like grizzly bears. We had a small country. Their country was large. We were contented to let things remain as the Great Spirit made them. They were not, and would change the rivers and mountains if they did not suit them.”
Chief Joseph

TILT:
Female cassowaries do not incubate their eggs but move on to lay eggs in several nests where the males care for them.