We tried to tell you that there was trouble in the middle east, that we needed to become less dependent on foreign oil. We tried to tell you that we spent more energy than we needed, and were not efficient enough. But you were too busy driving SUVs to the supermarket, and taking your ATV out for a spin at the quarry, and revving up your party boat in the summer. You were too busy earning bonuses on Wall Street while putting workers out of work, and calling it “efficiency.”

You were too busy being the better class, the masters of  the universe, you were too busy manipulating what you saw as a game, manipulating it so that you would always win. We were too busy surviving amidst a swirling economy that rewarded youth over experience, cheap over local. A system that pushed good people aside if they dared to earn the right to make a little more than you felt the need to pay.

All through this period of great expansion, you tossed people into the street and expected them to rebuild their economic worth at the end of their working lives, rendering their experience null and void. You were too busy leaving entire classes of people and their children to rot in sullen economic conditions, too poor to move and subject to the most harsh social conditions. We tried to tell you that people without opportunity will turn to opportunism, which means crime. We showed you the numbers; you were too busy building jails to throw them into, certain of your wisdom that a tough approach would send the proper message. What it failed to send was relief, and the problem only worsened.

We were too busy trying to keep families together while a significant member of that family served their time, and then re-integrating that person back into society. Sometimes there was no way to accomplish that: the same lack of opportunity that forced us into impossible choices, still remained.

You were too busy telling us that we need more religion, more morality, that we deserve God’s wrath because we have lived too selfishly, the same tactic a terrorist uses to justify bombing a school. You were too busy telling us that our problem was that we expected too much. We were too busy trying to get you to understand that a $75 trash bill and a $100 water bill have to come from somewhere. And then there is the $300 electric bill, the $200 car insurance, phone and internet if we intend to be civilized people, not to mention rent, food, clothing and so forth, and where is it all supposed to come from?

We were too busy trying to figure out why two middle class incomes are barely enough to keep one family afloat. Which is why we were all too busy to see that we were killing the planet. Oh sure, we saw a few things that we could fix. Air quality, water quality. Things we could understand, like black cities and dead lakes. But when we were confronted with a simple fact: that we were taking millions of years of carbon out of the ground and depositing it in the air and water in a century, we were just too damn busy to try to make sense of it.

And so we were too busy to understand that in all of human history, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had always stayed in a tight band between 180 and 280 parts per million. This was clearly the range that nature preferred, for hundreds of thousands of years, all of human history and beyond. Now, in a century, man had added another 100 parts per million. And we were too busy to try to make sense of that increase, and we allowed others to make sense of it for us. And we were too busy to notice that some of those people had no idea what they were talking about, and so we did not realize that we, too, had no idea what we were talking about.

And so we were clueless to the meaning of terms such as amplification, persistence, forcings, feedbacks and tipping points. We were too busy feeding off of this giant economic machine known as capitalism, too busy riding it as hard as we could, for blood or survival, riding it as though it were the giant horse and we the riders, and if we fell off there would be no getting back on.

And so we were too busy to notice that this overheated planet was being fed by an overheated economic system, and this economic system finally, inexorably heaved and fell, and passed its own tipping point. And so we watched in morbid fascination as the system imploded on itself, taking industries and institutions with it, and revealing ever greater catastrophes as it did. We became numb to new revelations of misdeeds, and when the sober governors of our fates told us that we had to bail out this mighty machine lest it die and take us with it, we nodded, shrugged, and went on about our business.

We were too busy to ask, why are we saving this dying system, so that it may finish the job of killing the planet? Why are we asking this system to recover, so that it may go on creating unequal classes of those who lust for profit and those who struggle to survive? Why is it that we want to go on living like we’re living?