Searching for New Eden

You know when we were all growing up in our nice, quiet, comfortable neighborhoods, enjoying family, friends and a good Saturday afternoon college football game on television? Nobody really thought too much about it at that time, I mean, why should we have given it any thought? For centuries it was just kind of “there.”  Nobody lived there, nobody wanted to, except for a few members of the scientific community, military people and a few penguins. At that time, no one could stand to live there for more than a few days in the icy cold air, the below zero temperatures and the loneliness. It doesn’t seem possible that only a generation later, it would become home to more than 33,000 people, and we’re growing every day. It’s certainly not a place I ever thought I would go to. To quote a profound, famous cliché, “that was then, this is now.”  And to quote another cliché; “when God closes a door, he opens a window”.  It’s not that I really love it here, but I guess it is quite interesting to be here and really, what other choices do I have?  Even though I get quite homesick and ask daily, what am I doing here? In reality this is the most exciting experience I could have ever dreamed of and the most exciting place in the world to be right now.  After all, how many people get to be a part of world history? How many people get a chance to become a part of a new society? And how many people get to go where no one else has gone before?

 I feel bad for the crawfish and the prawns; I miss them. I miss the pralines and the bayou cooking. I feel sorry for those who have chosen to stay behind, I miss my family and friends the most, but at the same time I am optimistic about our future. I miss the same things everyone does, the blooming of the magnolia trees, the variety of flowers that always popped out in the spring and lasted almost until Christmas, the birds and the alligators, the gumbo and those big “po-boy” sandwiches that can only be had in the French Quarter, but considering the fact that most of that is gone now, life on the other end of the world doesn’t seem so bad. I know it sounds strange, but I guess in reality, I could even say I like it here.

To get back to the questions, “how did we get where we are today? What are we doing here”? And what does the future hold? Additionally what happened that changed things so dramatically in such a short period of time to make such a drastic change possible? And most of all, how did we survive?  Were there warning signs? Absolutely there were.  Did we see it coming? Some did, but some got caught up in other things and refused to believe what was going on around them.             

In order to unravel this whole mess and to explain things to you let me take you on a guided tour back to my childhood. The year was 2000 and I was eight years old. We had just come through the messiest and most exhausting presidential election in American history that somehow, unknown to us would become the catalyst that would bring us to this point in time. We were coming out of a decade of great natural disasters. Nearly ninety percent of all the natural disasters, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes and volcanic eruptions that happened in the twentieth century happened in the short ten year period between 1990 and 1999.  The nineties also brought us great technological advances that led to a booming economy. Everybody was making money and by the end of the century, there were over one million millionaires in our country alone. The term “day trader” was not uncommon to most of the “me generation.” People were making money in mass amounts, some by only lifting a finger to click a computer mouse. It all seemed too easy. Everyone was saying of the stock market, “how high can it go?” We were preoccupied and possessed with prosperity and we loved it. By the year 2000, people had grown cold and indifferent to natural disasters; it was as if we had just simply stopped caring, our attention was somewhere else and somehow we believed our wealth could buy us anything we desired, including quick, painless fixes, comfort, stability and of course love and happiness.

For a time, our small worlds were unaffected by the subtle changes but each day it seemed there was another catastrophe somewhere in the world that brought us closer and closer, step by step until we had reached the point of no return, but these things happened so frequently that we had learned to accept them as commonplace and go on with our busy lives.  We didn’t care about the future anymore, we were too busy living for today. Unfortunately I had become one of those people. Like much of America my business was booming. As people amassed more money the demand for those crawfish and prawns by the social elite became mind-boggling. We couldn’t raise them fast enough to keep up with demand. It’s kind of like placing those live crawfish in warm water.  At first, the crawfish wouldn’t move at all, completely unknowing and unaware of his eventual fate, the warm water feels good to him at first but then things began to heat up. The crawfish squirms around playfully for a while, but as the water begins to boil he tries frantically to get out. His efforts are futile, as the water gets hotter, slowly killing him and in spite of all his efforts, he becomes boiled to death and there is nothing he can do to prevent it.  His fate is sealed and a living creature becomes dinner for a hungry Cajun. For at least twenty years, we were in that heating pot of water