Time out for a good word about homo sapiens.
Well done, humans. In spite of wars, drive-by killings, child abuse, traffic jams, we deserve a Survivors Medal.
Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 165 million years. Actually “ruled” is the wrong word. They existed on earth for all those years, but they were captives of their environment. Each boring day, longnecks raised their necks for foliage, and when the trees were bare, they moved to a new location. Their predator dinosaurs had to move along with them.
Fish, reptiles, insects, plants – all were slaves of the environment. But the environment was usually great. The size of some of the reptiles and dinosaurs in different epochs shows this. They didn’t reach 20 to 30 tons by skimping on dinner. They ate constantly, and the land provided.
Then came the extinctions. Woe to all life forms! When the first Ice Age came, enormous reptiles and other creatures starved or froze to death. When a meteor collided with Earth, the dinosaurs and everything they depended on cooked. The entire globe and almost everything in it died during these extinctions. The amazing fact is that SOME insects, SOME creatures, SOME plants survived, enough to start the Earth again when conditions became more favorable.
Mankind is the first species to resist the enslavement of the environment. Eskimos, for example. They manage to resist extreme cold. Desert-dwelling Africans resist extreme heat. Human beings don’t just sit and take it. They think about what’s happening and dig in to combat it.
Now that we’re aware of how we have totally loused up the planet, we are taking steps to fix it. And we will. Even if a meteor heads for Earth, we’ll launch a nuclear bomb to redirect it. Or something.
People tend to romanticize animals and people from earlier epochs. If the media had been around in the dinosaur era, angry editorials would have raged about the enormous piles of poop and dying trees left by moving herds. Dinosaurs made a huge impact on their environment, but we weren’t there to complain about it.
We romanticize humans, too. Despite the negative images of American Indians in early Westerns, we began to rhapsodize the simple lives of tribal life: clean, open and not glued to cell phones. Not true. Well, the absence of cells phones is true. Like dinosaurs, Indians moved from place to place to escape their own garbage. For amusement, they indulged in petty warfare and robberies with other tribes, stealing horses and women.
For most of human history, being a woman was a negative from the get-go. Women were property — like tepees and dogs. In many cultures, they were paired willy-nilly with men selected for political or financial purposes. Wives and daughters could be beaten, raped, deserted without recourse. They were labeled witches and sometimes burned at the stake when they got old and looked funny. It had to be a very paranoid time for grannies.
But even women have survived. Now they go to college, hold down six-figure jobs, get divorces, control the number of children they produce. They have been so successful in demanding equality that men are now complaining about their second-class status. Will men survive?
Of course.
