Why are You so Grouchy?

"Why are you so grouchy?"

People ask me this all of the time.

I used to know a comic book artist who ended up being revealed to me as a neo-Nazi who thought that all leftists were unhappy grouches. He was always a very happy fellow. I can't imagine the dreams that goose-stepped through his mind.

At any rate, I only seem grouchy much of the time. These people don't get to see me when I'm hiking and exploring the forests and mountains. They don't witness my wife and me paddling down a crystal clear spring run in sunny Florida. They don't hear me whoop with joy as I stand on a mountain pinnacle after scrambling to the summit to see the view at the top.

These folk also don't see me smiling as I labor on one of my novels or short stories, feeling joy as I figure out how to piece a yarn together to make it work.

That said, I concede that I have a realist's view of what we have done to this world. And having figured out what we have done and how we act, I see no happy ending for the world as we know it, nor for the companion creatures who have walked this globe alongside us for the past few thousand years.

Too late. Too late. Too late. The time to complain was when they were passing the laws that allowed this obscenity.

When People ask me why I'm always so grouchy (in truth, I'm not, but I seem so to them) I have to tell them that it's because I read widely and am aware of what we have done to Mother Earth and to our own societies and to one another and I clearly understand what is going to happen next.

We have been proceeding down a path that is leading to destruction. No one cares that soon there will be no whales plying the seas. No one cares that soon no tigers will be left to stalk the snows of Siberia or the mangrove swamps of India. No one will do what it will take to keep the tiny pika alive and comfortable in their alpine world. We will all stand aside and watch as the last wolf howls alone, trying to find companions who are no longer there. Not a single person will stand in the way as oil is pumped out of the Earth's violated skin, as gas is spat out by spewing polluted water into our aquifers, as our mountains are torn down and their shattered summits packed into watersheds that will flow no more. People will stand and nod while our marshes are drained and soon the birds that once filled our skies will all lie like dried and fluttering husks in the dead air.

Grouchy? Not really. I just see what's coming down the pike. At the end of that road is a big gaping pit called Extinction. We're headed there at break-neck speed.

My fellow Americans.