The Screaming Twenties

Humanity has awakened to this new decade as a newborn babe ushered into the world with a hard slap on the ass. The very clinical hand of SARS-CoV-19 has roused us out of the warm slumber of high civilization’s womb. Like all new humans, born as separate beings into this universe, all we know is that we want our Mummy!

We cry out in fear as mysterious, blurry objects swirl about. Our eyes are open, but we can’t quite make heads or tails of the situation. A confused miasma of lights, sounds, words, concepts, and emotions surround us. We can’t quite tell what’s in our own heads and what’s the truly objective reality. We lack the vision to see clearly what has befallen us. We lack the understanding and the words to even ask for what we really need. All we know is “I want my Mummy!” Lacking the words, we just wail like a banshee.

Alas, my poor babies, you’ve been born an orphan into this new age. You’ve been placed into an incubator where social distance is necessary for your survival. Your mother, or at least, your surrogate mother, has been placed in the ICU. To put it plainly, you really cannot rely on civilization — your surrogate mother — to sustain you at this point. All you have is the rhythmic beeps and blinking lights of technology to rely on.

Here we are, humanity at the beginning of a new age, on life support, and having no clue. Like fragile neonates, we fall asleep in an incubator at the mercy of 21st-century technology.

That’s what I mean by the screaming twenties. Coronavirus was just the start. Oddly, people have forgotten last year’s fires consuming Australia, California and the Amazon rainforest. It’s like those things happened pre-COVID-19, so we can ignore it. Like children who can’t fathom that their parents had a life before they were born, people don’t understand why Mommy and Daddy are behaving so strangely. Similarly, no one can connect the dots between the pandemic, globalization, our carbon-based economies, the need for 7.8 billion people to survive, and humanity’s treatment of nature and animals — just to name a few. Perhaps COVID-19 emerged from the same systems on which are globalized economy depends?

Furthermore, no one seems to think that multiple disasters can strike simultaneously as it did in Croatia. There an earthquake struck at the same time as a quarantine. It’s hard to shelter in place when your house is about to fall on your head. That’s more like being cold-cocked in the face than getting spanked on the butt.

Expect more of this. The economy is the lifeblood of our current civilization, our surrogate mother. We know she’s on life support. Hopefully, she’ll bounce back. But that’s not all. Humans may have slowed or stopped their activities by sheltering in place, but the world keeps spinning around. Humanity is still destroying the ecosystems on which we depend for survival. That’s our real mother, the Earth, I’m talking about. When Earth lands in the ICU, the incubator plug of Orphaned Humanity will be pulled. Hopefully, the baby grows up before then.

As the saying goes, the beatings will continue until morale improves. I mean that seriously though. As orphans in this new world, we can be prone to cynicism and despair. The flip side is an orphan’s tendency to become wise beyond his or her years. Indeed, now is the time to grow in wisdom. Humanity needs to grow up — and fast.

As we enter this brave new world, expect a lot of anomie that will become traps for orphaned humanity. With so many dangerous paths on the journey, the Elders among us must take on the challenge to nourish and nurture orphaned humanity along its journey. To begin, the world will need steady, even stoic, souls to be the doulas assisting with this difficult birth. How can we help the surrogate and the child survive without lasting trauma?

Even more, we will need Wise Elders to assist orphaned humanity along the journey. The archetype of the Orphan is associated with allowing other people to take control of their lives. The Wise Elders need to advise caution against this impulse, as orphans need the freedom to unleash their inner creative spirits. The gravity of authoritarianism is pulling humanity down already. Let’s not let humanity fall into that trap. We’ve been there before. It always ends in mass death. I call on the Wise Elders to help create a new, compelling vision of freedom and a map for Orphaned Humanity to get there.

Orphaned Humanity is like the ugly duckling that needs to reunite with its kind and learn to love himself or herself. And what is humanity’s kind? The children of Earth, of course. The human species reflects the eco-systems that have sustained it for eons. It is kindred to all the other species the Earth has given birth to. When we learn to love passionately the Earth and to love our fellow Earthlings, human and non-human alike, we will have reached the successful conclusion of the journey. We’ll find that love really is the answer.

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