Mass Amnesia and My Summer Vacation

When I looked out at the Gulf of Mexico from the bow of the charter fishing boat, I couldn’t help but count the plastic. Old plastic never dies, it is instead broken down into ever decreasing smaller bits. At 5mm broken down plastics begin to coalesce with mirco-flora, sand, plankton, and other basic staples to the ocean’s health. When they get even smaller, they are absorbed through gills or eaten, and can enter the flesh of every living thing in the ocean.

My eyes glance back to the cooler behind me and the stringer of fish that bears my name, then back again to the 11^th floating water bottle our ship passed. I wonder what they taste like. Perhaps worse than my fish, the oceans corals, which provide habitat for ocean life, already have measured concentrations of a whole host of chemicals from plastics with names that most of us couldn’t pronounce. As these reefs continue to absorb our waste products, they recede, and further reduce the amount of healthy bio-matter sea life can consume, thereby escalating the amount of microplastic these organisms ingest.

The whole scene is to me, Macbethian: a downward spiral of betrayal and ego; a betrayal of God’s gift of ocean. This gift provides over 1/5 of Earth’s digestible protein and it is wasting away one plastic piece at a time as the fruit of our conveniences and apathy blend like tiny beads and infuse themselves with the sand.

Back home and on dry land, the summer subtleties of things like “regulation” and “environmental protection” are debated. In my experience, it is not the fishermen debating these things. Fishermen have historically been the planet’s first ecologists because throughout history, their livelihood depended on it. Recreational fisherman today can tell you and probably even take you to specific places where their catches have been impacted by human beings. For fisherman, the life and death cycle of their trade is sketched directly onto the canvas of the water. The old fishermen see it best and most clear.

Jesus chose fishermen to be his dearest friends and closest traveling companions. As I am transitioning into an old fisherman, I am beginning to see that he did so for very good reasons. Fisherman are keen observers with great memories. In the age before GPS marking, fisherman had to know their spots, remember each drop-off or sandbar or hidden stump that held their prizes. Fisherman know when these spots are perturbed; they have learned almost subconsciously to recognize changes and patterns, and adjust their day’s work accordingly.

For micro-plastics to go unnoticed by the average man, or for that strip-mining operation that dumps cyanide into our rivers and streams to carry on unfettered by regulation, a kind of mass amnesia would need to happen to the American people. That mass amnesia would need to be orchestrated by the corporations which benefit and their allies. No amount of damage done to a place matters much to the corporation doing the extracting or building the products. They have no intention of living in places where factories and mines and metals unleash their havoc. Once the resource is consumed or the product complete, they will do what all corporations do, and that is move on to the next money grab.

The wave of amnesia lifts for the average man only when the impacts are felt directly… but the fisherman knows I think, before the rest. She sees it happening season after season after season. She reads the canvas at the end of her fishing line, and in that instinctive space knows firsthand how human and water are meant to interact.

Jesus chose fishermen, I believe, because fishermen know life and are committed to sustain it. Fisherman are more resistant to the mass amnesia and have their own built in immune system to anything that affects their trophy spots. We see it first, and we know it when we see it, just like I could not help but count the plastic in the Gulf of Mexico.

We’ve elected a President who has hand-picked leaders around him to spread mass amnesia, especially on the issue of the environment. We’re told that environmental regulation negatively impacts business, and I have no doubt that this is true. The right thing is almost always more difficult and it usually requires more from us, than the wrong thing. The wrong thing is usually cheap and easy. Doing the right thing costs, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it work differently.

In Macbeth, Shakespeare reminds us that “sometimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths.” Whatever truth there may be to cutting corners on controlling pollution, whatever truth their might be in the cost savings of doing the easy thing, there is the overarching question of the harm to which such truths ultimately win our species.

Jesus is again calling fishermen and disciples to his journey of truth-telling. I, for one, cannot tell him no.