Grey cities, grey people

A lament for the natural world.

Jan 18, 2024

First, they enclosed what was ours. What used to nurture and feed generations was turned into capital. Annihilated. Broken. Burned. We never reclaimed what was stolen.

Then they took our forests.

Our grasslands.

Our rivers and streams, our lakes; filthy and toxic.

The oceans are dying, the ice melting, there’s plastic in our blood.

Who will stop the onslaught?

All around me are familiar faces
Worn-out places, worn-out faces

I live in a middle-sized city in Central Europe. A nation small yet wealthy. This nation features stunning snowcapped mountains, crystal clear lakes, endless wild forests, untamed grasslands — at least it used to. Now it’s mostly grey. The lakes have dried out, the forests are lumber, the grasslands are concrete. The mountains remain the last fortress of the wild, their inaccessibility like a thin protective layer… for now.

Last year, I intended to traverse this country from one end to the other. Through the forests, across the Alps. I was supposed to spend two months alone in the wilderness. An injury cut the adventure short. Two weeks is all I managed, in the end. Yet those two weeks served as a sharp reminder: what have we done? Where is the wild?

Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere

Agriculture and forestry conquered every accessible square meter of this land. What remains is covered, littered by villages and cities. Humans, humans everywhere. They carry their grey poison wherever they go, everywhere.

Bulldoze, destroy, kill; streets, buildings, cars.

Everywhere.

A constantly rising population, more and more people, more and more garbage and grey, more industrial slaughterhouses, and still it is not enough. We are having too few children; we must reproduce, we must grow. Why are younger generations so depressed and apathetic? Why are they refusing to spend their lives in slave labor to the wealthy and powerful? Why are they not having children? Why did they escape the real world into the artificial and synthetic? Are virtual worlds all we have left?

It remains a mystery.

How can anyone possibly not appreciate this reality?

Why are you unhappy? Do you not see what we made? Do you not enjoy the material?

Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression

What we do to animals and nature is but a reminder of what we are. Yes, most of us are innocent of cruelty and violence. Yet cruelty and violence form the very foundation upon which we stand and breathe. Every one of us lives on borrowed blood.

It is one thing to know where our material comforts come from, how they are produced, who produces them, what this production does to the earth; it is one thing to know where meat comes from, how many are murdered, billions every day, how they live and suffer and die in abhorrent cages.

It is a different thing entirely to see.

Cognitive dissonance is a misnomer for how can it be a dissonance when it is the norm? Those who, for whatever reason, cannot sustain the illusion are the dissonant chords in the symphony that is industrial society. Hate the activist, hate the vegan, hate the humanitarian, but, please, for God’s sake, under no circumstances reject the system and fail the murderers in suits.

Liberal morality is a misnomer, too, for how can anything so selective, inconsistent, and contradictive be called morality? There is no morality. Let’s stop lying to ourselves and face the truth: we have become death. Perhaps we have always been death. The earth is a graveyard of our making.

Grey cities make grey people.

Hide my head, I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow

One must enjoy and appreciate all that was achieved. The defeat of most diseases, longevity, material comfort, hygiene, technical wonders, artistic masterpieces, growth, growth, growth, growth in all matters of life.

Yet everything comes at a price. You live in sterility and isolation, alienated and depressed, but comfortable. You can do anything, anything at all, but only what you are allowed. You can be whatever you want to be, but if you are not the way you must be, you will be fed the happy pills, the sleeping pills, the barely-functioning pills, the you-are-too-fat pills, the boner pills, and, most important of all, the go-the-fuck-to-work pills.

Pills are a good thing, actually. What would we do without pills? Perhaps murder each other and bomb and mutilate children. Perhaps starve entire continents and keep them in artificial poverty. Perhaps plunder and burn all we were given. Perhaps make a world that will undo itself.

And what a world that would be.

Mad world
Mad world
Mad world
Mad world

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