HUMANS

When I think about humans - which happens often, since I am human - the foremost notion about our species that comes to mind is this: there are too many of us.

I know that vast areas of this planet are “uninhabited” and that is fine by me. But we tend to congregate together and thus our presence on Earth tends primarily towards concentrated population zones. With the ever-advancing speed of technological innovation, comes more and more STUFF. We have become a species that loves the things we make and we surround ourselves with so many things that we allow the waste and destruction that accompanies their creation and use to remain largely outside of our consciousness. Not just the pollution that is already altering the climate globally, but also the more mundane junk that multiplies everywhere. We buy a simple doo-dad at the store and think nothing of the complicated plastic container that holds it and as we toss this plastic object into the waste can no one shudders. I do this countless times a week and I realize how ridiculous it is. One tries to be thoughtful....but the stuff keeps coming and piling up and the landfill is the new collective unconscious of the consumer society.

Most of believe we are special - humans, that is. We gaze at the extraordinary images sent to us from the Hubble telescope, images of entire galaxies reduced to lovely little swirls in a mind-boggling panoply of countless such galaxies, and then many of us wonder if we are the only inhabited planet in the universe. The utter silliness of this is on the order of the nincompoops who visit the Creation Museum and buy the snake oil package for what it is.

A wonderful object, it seems to me, is a thing of preciousness to which we may become attached in a reciprocal and meaningful relationship. Place twenty objects alongside this first object and you have reduced its specialness somewhat. The collector would disagree with this but that is a different case.

My friends in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles might disagree that there are two many humans around. But even here in the middle of the world, the change has become dramatically apparent. We seem to be everywhere.