The flood

The writing’s on the wall, yet folk act like they can’t read. Now I know how Noah must’ve felt.

Last week, the Trump administration announced plans to allow oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the largest remaining tracts of untouched wilderness in the United States. 

The refuge’s coastal plain spans 1.56 million pristine acres and sits at a latitude higher than much of Greenland. Beneath it may lie billions of barrels of oil. Above ground, it’s a habitat for polar bears, caribou, migratory birds and other wildlife that depend on this fragile ecosystem for survival.

The administration’s decision to drill in the arctic foreshadows disaster unless we wake up and take action now.

Pick up any history book, and you’ll see that Trump is currently running one of the oldest plays in the despotic playbook: manufacture unrest to justify martial law and consolidate power.

We’ve recently seen how this works in a non-despotic context in Ukraine, where presidential elections scheduled for 2024 were suspended under martial law. U.S. law doesn’t explicitly forbid elections under such conditions, but it wouldn’t take an especially cunning legal mind to find ways to subvert democracy under a “national emergency.” And as we’ve learned, this administration will test any legal limit it thinks it can get away with.

Anyone who believes we’ll still have democratic elections in 2028 if Trump is still alive is fooling themselves. That man will die in the White House — unless Americans rapidly evolve the quality of our collective consciousness.

Trump has already signaled that one of his first orders of business as dictator would be to acquire Greenland, which is also mineral-rich, under the pretext of national security. But the true motive would be extraction: to strip the island for resources and reward his corporate cronies. Trump’s affinity for Putin makes perfect sense in this light because the perceived threat of Russian imperialism gives him an excuse to flex his own imperialistic instincts.

Once drilling for minearals and hydrocarbons begins in Greenland, its already fragile glaciers will rupture. Global warming will accelerate. Floods will come — catastrophic, biblical floods, the likes of which humanity hasn’t seen since the days of Noah.

Scientists will warn Dictator Trump. They will plead. But the machine will march on, because corporations require infinite growth on a planet with finite resources. That’s how corporatism works, and it is unsustainable.

And there will be no one around to check it because Trump will have installed loyalists in every role designed to limit presidential power. Even if he hadn’t, the truth is he doesn’t need to. He already has our complicity in corporatism. 

President Trump understands on a soul level that nearly all of us are in bed with the corporations that are devouring the planet. The same scientists, senators, and environmental lawyers who decry corporate greed have their finances all tied up in mutual funds invested in those same corporations.

We are, collectively, a nation of hoodwinked hypocrites.

It’s no coincidence that the corporate leaders who run our country dismantled the pension system — where retirement income was guaranteed and employer-managed — and replaced it with 401(k)s that funnel our wages directly into Wall Street. We became shareholders in our own demise. We were taught that when corporations thrived, we did too. In truth, the opposite is happening: the more they profit, the more the planet perishes.

Corporations are semi-intelligent entities — parasites that embed themselves in the fabric of our lives like rot. Even if you’ve never set foot in a boardroom, you likely own pieces of oil companies, weapons manufacturers, and pharmaceutical giants.

That’s the insidious genius of the corporate system that organizes everything in our society: we are the system.

Yet, there is hope. The ark is still afloat. 

Every passing moment is another chance to turn it all around through the gift of free will.

Our retirement accounts are corporations’ lifeblood, their endless sources of capital. But because our fortunes have been tied to theirs, we also hold the power to cut them off at the knees. We can consciously divest from the stock market to cripple corporatism.

If even a modest percentage of us divested our retirement accounts from the stock market, corporatism would crumble. The empire would lose its fuel. Something new — something sustainable, humane, and heart-centered — could emerge from the wreckage.

If not, the flood.

Picture a villager in the Amazon watching his homeland decimated so foreigners can furnish their homes with rare teak. This sort of thing happens everywhere, every day, across the globe. The corporate machine will consume until nothing remains. Unless we wake up today, the flood is coming tomorrow.

Fear and greed are the twin anchors holding us back. We fear losing money. We crave our creature comforts. But when the Earth becomes uninhabitable, all our possessions and profits will mean nothing. There will be no markets left to trade in, no stuff to buy, no air to breathe.

The real risk isn’t change — it’s proceeding with the status quo, which only leads to our species’ extinction. 

We fold into realities that match our vibrations. Real transformation always comes from the inside out, and never from the outside in. 

Change doesn’t begin with governments or corporations or big, sweeping movements, but with individuals like you and me.

Practice leading with the heart.
Be the change.
Divest today.

Our choices will either build the ark… or feed the flood.