• A Jaguar sedan is passing us on the left. Handsome black car. Siri tells us that 21,000 of them are sold in the USA each year.
“Ask Siri about real jaguars.” “What about real jaguars, Siri?” After a few false starts, Siri determines that only eight wild jaguars have been spotted in the USA over the past thirty years, all thought to be immigrants from Mexico.
• The radio just said that thanks to the endless slaughter of elephants for their tusks, the number of female elephants without tusks is rapidly increasing, due to a genetic mutation and the power of evolution. Go, Darwin!
• Every time I see a black bear, I’m in a car and it’s fleeing across the road or climbing a fence or hiding in a cornfield.
Every time I see a non-human wild mammal, in fact, I feel a small spear piercing my heart.
• Now we’re passing a cop car, its lights flashing. The driver of the pulled-over vehicle looks black.
Amazing, isn’t it, says my passenger, how even though there is really no such thing as “race,” it defines the experiences and fundamental outlooks of billions of people the world over. Maybe if people’s skin color were identified a “shade,” instead, as in, What shade is he? Oh, like an oak leaf in November . . .
• “I read the other day,” she says, “that there are about eight hundred billionaires in America. And 14.5 million children living in poverty.” I calculate while driving: The first group can earn at least $60 million per year doing absolutely nothing. The second group is CHILDREN.
• Next she tells me that the Fish and Wildlife Service removed twenty-one species from its Endangered Species list three years ago because they’re extinct.
“Better luck next time,” I say. “There’s no next time,” she says.
• The state of Georgia, a Ted Talker says, lost 80 percent of its peach crop last year because of climate change. Worldwide crop failures are expected to be 4.5 times more frequent by 2030 than today, and 25 times more frequent by 2050, with rice and wheat, providing 60 percent of the world’s calories, expected to fail every other year.
These facts make us lose our appetites. Fortunately.
• “So where do you want to go?” I ask her. “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”
This is important. As we rush into the Sixth Extinction, the cry of "1Venceremos!" seems nowhere nearly enough, as we head, seemingly with little or no hope into increasing disaster. What to do? Ha-Shem (should there turn out to be such an entity) seems not to be listening. Numerous countries, including Israel and the U.S. are locked in the struggle with Fascism rearing its terrifying presence in both. Keep up the struggle, and if we lose, as well we might, hope that at our last moments we might have a friend or lover to hold close and say, "At least we tried." Roni Fuller