Obscenities

Lately, not a day goes by without plenty of stories being published in the media regarding climate disruption and environmental destruction. In light of these, the actions of some of the world's richest and 'most successful' people must be considered obscene.
   It is obscene that Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, motivated only by profit and perhaps a need for ego stroking, intend to "take tens of thousands of people to space," with little or no regard for what that would do to an already battered and suffering biosphere. No mention is made by any of them of the environmental effects of these pernicious activities. Already, having hundreds of millions of people driving cars and trucks, and hundreds of thousands flying in planes every day, is doing enough damage. Adding hordes of space-tourists into the mix will only aggravate our ecological woes. It's not rocket science.
   It is also obscene that people and corporations are allowed to accumulate huge amounts of money without assuming any responsibility to truly benefit the societies that they plucked it from in the first place. It is obscene that our economic systems not only allow that but encourage it.
   Richard Branson and his space-soul-mates Elon Musk with his extraterrestrial Tesla Roadster and SpaceX Starship, and  Jeff Bezos with his phallus-shaped rockets, along with tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of similarly-minded investors around the world, play the game of Big Money in ways that the rest of us can't imagine, and a good many of us wouldn't even want to try and grasp. But what they themselves can't seem to understand very well, or maybe what they ignore all too well, is what is really going on in the world around them, and why.
   If they really got it, they wouldn't be investing in commercial space ventures of dubious worth, or in enterprises involving resource over-extraction, toxin production and the like, but rather in climate damage control, environmental restoration, planetary cleanup, water and air purification, and other urgent goals.
   Granted, there's little or no money to be made in healing the planet, but surely they already have enough that they could spend some for the common good, rather than just enriching or glorifying themselves? They couldn't expect huge monetary gains from such investments but they could look forward to some significant and deeply appreciated social returns. Not so much a profit in the wallet as a profit of the soul.
   I wish Bezos, Branson, Musk and their ilk no ill will, but at the same time I can't honestly say that I wish them good luck in their adventures in space or on Wall Street. Instead, I only wish they would divert to other, more socially beneficial investment paths, not necessarily lucrative ones in terms of personal gains, but potentially more rewarding in an invaluable and priceless sort of way.
   I'm not claiming that wealth is always so problematic, but the movers, shakers and thinkers of the world need to disrupt and restructure our economic systems in order to inject huge helpings of good purpose, morality and sanity into our daily business. It has gotten to the point where our very lives are at stake.

(image by kirillslov on pixabay)