I saw a bumper sticker in a parking lot a few weeks ago. It was black with plain white letters: Let Them Freeze in the Dark. I stood there for a moment trying to figure it out.
Then I noticed the vehicle: a large, black Cadillac Escalade hanging over both sides of the parking space and sticking out in back. And then I understood.
3 thoughts…
1. What it meant
The critical clue was of course the vehicle. Any bumper sticker on a shiny Escalade can probably be interpreted thru the lens of the Escalade itself.
I had a trouble interpreting the slogan at first, but upon seeing the behemoth it was attached to, the message became clear.
I got mine, and I’ll be darned if I’m going to give it up. Anyone that thinks otherwise, is a lame, no-good weasel who clearly doesn’t have theirs yet and wants what I got. But I got it, and they don’t, and if they don’t want to drill-baby-drill, well then they’re just gonna be cold all alone, aren’t they, because clearly I won’t, haven’t you figured that out by now?
2. The root of all evil
This is greed is good gone bad.
A total lack of interest in anything other than personal gratification and comfort. A total rejection of any notion of the general good, of society’s interest, of shared values, of civility.
It’s moral relativism at the other end of the spectrum: good is only meaningful relative to the comfort it creates; nothing else matters.
But this attitude is in my opinion the root of all evil today. You’re not the king of me. Only I matter to me and not how I behave toward you. It’s all a game, anyway.
This is nihilism at it’s worst. Nothing is important, so I get to make up the rules. And you better stand back.
Is it any wonder Blankenfineship Lord of Goldman-Sachs, sees his work as the work of god?
This attitude is evil, plain and simple. (And wasn’t the Escalade black?)
3. My corner of space-time
Now in the long-long run, I suppose it is true that nothing matters.
Dust to dust, after all. All is vanity. The sun will eventually go super-nova, and all this will, I admit, be moot. This pontificating. The bumper sticker. The Escalade. The champagne. The greed. The birds in the trees. The flowers in spring. Everything will eventually be moot.
But that is not the frame in which I choose to live my life.
I choose to act as if the ultimate void will never come. As if the birds and flowers are important. As if suffering caused by financial crises is a bad thing. As if poisoning the rivers is bad. As if the mountains majesties matter. As if happiness is a fundamentally good thing.
I choose a subset of the universe in which ethics are relevant even though they might not be in the long-long term. And in that little corner of space-time, I choose to reject everything that that guy in the Escalade stands for not only as wrong, but as gut-bustingly disgusting.
On the other hand, I had a veggie burger that day. He probably had a burger and fries and shake and is going to get what he’s got coming to him, hopefully before I start freezing.