We Batter This Planet As

I Guess I So Desperately Want To See Us Put This Planet Right. It's So Horrifying To Me That A Fifth Of Us Are Starving Every Night, And That Forty Thousand Children Die Every Single Day.

For Most Of The History Of Our Species We Were Helpless To Understand How Nature Works. We Took Every Storm, Drought, Illness And Comet Personally. We Created Myths And Spirits In An Attempt To Explain The Patterns Of Nature.

I Remember That One Time Carl Sagan Was Giving A Talk, And He Spelled Out, In A Kind Of Withering Succession, These Great Theories Of Demotion That Science Has Dealt Us, All Of The Ways In Which Science Is Telling Us We Are Not Who We Would Like To Believe We Are. At The End Of It, A Young Man Came Up To Him And He Said: "what Do You Give Us In Return? Now That You've Taken Everything From Us? What Meaning Is Left, If Everything That I've Been Taught Since I Was A Child Turns Out To Be Untrue?" Carl Looked At Him And Said, Do Something Meaningful.

We Smoked The Way Other American Families Would Have Wine With Dinner. For Us, It Was Our Sacrament. It Was Something That Made A Great Life Sweeter In Every Possible Way.

The Only Gratification That Science Denies To Us Is Deception.