What have they done to the earth? 
What have they done to our fair sister? 
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her 
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn 
And tied her with fences and dragged her down 

                                            Jim Morrison

Australia is in flames from coast to coast and judging from online posts someone is to blame. Placing blame for these Australia wide fires on individual shires or a lack of precautionary burns is a futile exercise .

We as a nation and a world have allowed organizations set up by an ignorant greedy lot of billionaires to distract us from the truth. Our collective arse is on fire but most of us have not yet realized it.

Money power and consumption has dazzled us into thinking we are in charge of the earth and its ecosystems even as our houses burn down in front of our eyes or are swept away by raging torrents.

We ignore the spreading deserts and the great rivers reduced to a dirty trickle, the foul air that gives us cancer and focus our eyes on baubles and beads. Indeed we are the age of ignorance, the deniers of science and truth.

Hallelujah to the great great billionaires for they will bring us wealth beyond our dreams. The golden crumbs will trickle from their tables and make us all whole. Blessed are the rich for they are Gods among men.

These giants of industry and commerce who have bought our democracy and direct our governments, listen to our conversations, track our mail, investigate our habits and purchases. They gauge and direct our thoughts to design fantasy worlds that we can buy with our future..

So what is this truth we ignore and the science from which, we avert our gaze?   It is that we have traded our children’s future for potato crisps, polar bears for a bigger car, gorilla’s for palm oil, bees for a quick buck.

We have untangled the web of life and found ourselves on the edge of extinction. But we have averted our eyes to the precipice we walk along because we are distracted by our new gizmo, we do not hear because we are on our mobile phones. Masters of the universe lost in a miasma of self- delusion.

We are to blame, we elected these lying deluding and secretive fools who sell us to the highest bidder.  We have listened to their baying for war while praying for peace. We allowed them to create a world of division and conflict instead of friendship and cooperation. We allowed them to plunder the earth and poison our air. We are the ones to blame and we are the only ones who can repair the damage.