By 1982 and '83, if I was still in tears, it was (yes) in part because I was homesick for England, but it was also because I realized that in order to pay back my heavy load of student loans, I needed to work within a capitalist system that I already realized I didn't fully believe in. On a few occasions, I engaged my favorite capitalist in conversation, hoping I would learn something that would help me function better. Yet in the end, the explanations didn't open my heart, and, if anything, made me more dubious. Even then, I saw a direct link between human actions and environmental problems, and I rather snarkily said something like: "So capitalism is men making a lot of money causing problems that they can then make more money trying to solve?" There was a lot of harrumphing about human inventiveness being the solution to any problem...and at the end of one more similar conversation, this man threw up his hands and told me to go away, that I was scary.
What is extraordinary is that never then or subsequently has anyone ever apparently said to themselves, "Here is an unusually intelligent and well-educated woman who is troubled by our system. I wonder what she sees?" It was always a one-way "conversation", people (yes, sometimes women!) "'splaining" why we all have to play this game to survive, and advising me to just get on with it.
Fast forward to the present. There's a car advertisement on TV that is, I must say, beautifully done and quite striking. An impossibly handsome white man (who looks rather like the illustrations of Jesus in old fashioned children's books) is driving an impossibly beautiful SUV up and down a beach, trailing a large rake. He is raking up the human-generated trash on the beach so that he can put it in plastic bags and take it to the dump. Once that stretch of the beach is clean, smiling sea turtles (which can represent Mother Earth) walk out of the ocean onto the sand. The message seems to be, if you buy the right car, you, too, can save the planet.
OK, I just have to say this. Saving the earth might have happened 50 or 100 or 500 years ago, if the concerns of women and under-represented groups, and concerns about the environment, had been fully engaged as new inventions and technology were being developed. We might have saved the earth if we had proceeded far more slowly and thoughtfully. As it is now, Nature is the only force with the power to "save"/re-balance earth, and that solution may or may not be to our liking. My version of that ad would have the man getting out of his car, standing and looking out to sea, and saying, "I am sorry for my part in throwing this planet into disharmony. What would you have me do?" And the advertisement might end with him silently listening for the answer, then walking down the beach away from the car.
