Unmarked

 

The residential school unmarked graves of innocent children are a stark reminder of what horrors can come when a neo colonial extractivist philosophy is valued above the lives of innocent children. Extractivism means you extract oil from the ground, and extract labour from the people, and extract land from people, all above the value of our own dear children in our own dear human family.

In the power of this moment of anguish, where is the power of the notion of a “nation?”

In what some call "Canada," July 1 used to be called “Dominion Day” as if some power is dominating another. This year on july 1 let’s just leave that day unmarked.

When I see photos of our Earth from space I don’t see any borders, so, for once, let’s unite as one family in this climate crisis and leave all the artificial borders on Earth unmarked. We are all Earth’s children.

We humans are leaving our mark on the Earth: What kind of mark is that? One of our own extinction?

Will this planet Earth be the home for humanity or one huge unmarked grave?

What kind of residential school grade would we give ourselves for the climate crisis mass murder-suicide that we are all now doing to ourselves? If we don’t even value our own dear children in our own dear human family by letting them survive this climate crisis that we got ourselves into, then let’s just leave our grade value on this failed project unmarked.

We stand at a crossroads right now: The IPCC says that we need to act now. We need to choose renewable energy just so that our children don’t look back at us from their graves and hate us and haunt us. We are at a crossroads. Our choices now …will be felt in the future… like never before in the past. And yet climate deniers, both hard ones and soft ones, are telling us that the defining moment of our time is unmarked.

The climate crisis is screaming at us with the screams of the starving children of the future –a starvation that we will all collectively create unless we act now…… And yet to some, the evidence is intangible: It is one that is hard to see, hard to point to, hard to grasp, hard to fathom.

Yet the results of inaction at this stage will definitely not go undiscovered in the future. Quite the opposite: We cannot hope that no one will ever know of our trying to hide future graves. We are already in the spotlight. Our children already see our action or inaction. As we stand at this unmarked crossroads we are already haunted by this question:

How will we respond with love for children in this unmarked emergency?

Think of “the memory we could be...”*

*book title by Daniel Voskoboynik

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