Every Sunday morning thousands of people are sitting in sterile buildings and being told that they are rotten people and that they need to tithe more. I could be in Sunday School right now listening to Mr. Jameson thank the Lord for his new Chevrolet. But, instead, I'm sitting in my bed right now with my laptop, and I am blogging.
Maybe one day after I've croaked someone will be curious and begin reading my nearly 500 blog posts. Just who was that Todd Daniel guy? An interesting fellow, for sure. Perhaps my writings will be read at campfires after our civilization collapses. I might provide some guidance for the next civilization, which is good since I've given up on this one.
When I say in my blog description that I plan to put my writings into a capsule and launch them into space, I am serious. For $2,500 Elon Musk's SpaceX will dump my writings into the cosmos. I just have to figure out the best media format and how to protect everything from the extreme temperatures of space. At some point in the future an alien civilization will pick up my little pod and begin reading about how I loved nature, was a hopeless romantic, and lived with eternal guilt because my American lifestyle was destroying the world I loved.
If I could sum up my life at age 58, I'd define it as always searching for love, always feeling guilty for not doing more, and always living under a cloud of imminent doom.
Love
At age 15 I had this dream where the future girl of my dreams spoke to me in a cloudy vision. She was out there, and I just had to find her. Having gone through a failed marriage and been told "I just want friendship" a dozen times, I now realize that finding Ms. Right is a real challenge. Time is running out. I often feel like the knight in shining armor who meets the damsel of his dreams and then dies in battle the next day.
External Guilt
Most of what we live with in this world is a facade, including the green movement. I know that the metal for wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars is made in dirty mills. Huge fuel-consuming factories make the green products that help us feel good about ourselves. Every time I get in my car I know that I'm damaging the world. Every time I buy groceries and every time I flush my toilet I am putting more strain on the overpopulated planet that sustains us. Agriculture was a big mistake, and now there is not enough open land for all of us to become hunter-gatherers. And even then we over-hunted, which forced us to migrate and screw over another area. See, all we humans can do is destroy. Every day tons of garbage, raw sewage, and industrial waste are dumped into our oceans, and all the oceans are connected. Then, we eat tuna and other fish pulled from those oceans. We are slowly poisoning everything that sustains us and killing not only ourselves but thousands of other animal species.
Imminent Doom
During my newspaper days I developed a fascination with Congressman Larry McDonald (GA D-7), who was an arch conservative Democrat. One day I attended one of his town hall meetings, and as a member of the press I got to sit in front. He had a large display board set up and spent the evening talking about the dangers of the U.S. federal deficit. A couple of months later he was dead — shot down by the Soviet Union while flying in a Korean airliner. Sadly, his message about the federal debt went down in flames. The sum of his presentation is that our country is screwed. Soon, the weight of our growing debt will all come down, sending our nation, and likely the world, into a deep depression.
The other dark cloud that hangs over me is, indeed, a dark cloud. It's called global warming. Back in the 1990s I met a guy named Bob Fletcher in my local Sierra Club group, who was an early pioneer and activist on the issue of climate change. What he taught me in 1999 has stuck in my head. We are already seeing the weather extremes and sea level rises caused by global warming, but these events are only the opening act. The floods, droughts, wildfires, sea level rise, and super storms will only get worse, plus we will be forced to deal with food supply and health issues. If we choose to live in a miserably hot and crowded world, well, that's our choice, but what we are doing to millions of other animal species is extremely unfair. I live with this guilt every single day.
Silver Lining
I've made plenty of bad decisions in my life and so have other people I know. I am trying to be more careful with decision making but in the "heat of the moment" judgement and perceptions are often skewed. Hindsight really is 20-20 and what seems like the perfectly logical decision now wasn't even on my radar screen at the time. I feel that all of humanity is faced with this same dilemma. I can only hope that all of us will begin making the decisions that will give us a healthy future and put us on a sustainable path. At least the bad decisions and bad events in our lives provide good learning experiences.
