I’ve started a new document on my computer called Rants. You’ll read the fruits of that here. I know the world is full of horrible bad news everywhere you look, so this isn’t something I want to dwell on. I write because I need to process my feelings about the world and my little life on it. It’s why I write fiction that tries to imagine life on the other side of the horribleness. I believe there will be an other side. I’m just afraid of what it will take to get there.

I’ve been in a funk lately. Letdown from a new book coming out, maybe. Stress from the thousands of dollars I might need to spend to fix a plugged drainpipe in my yard that’s backing groundwater up into my basement. Fear that digging up said pipe might destroy the internet cable Dig Safe couldn’t find, leading to more dollars spent moving a large patio stone that covers the line at the house. None of this might happen, but I have one of those minds that goes to the worst-case scenario every time. I fondly refer to it as, Expect the Worst, Hope for the Best. I’m also one of those who believe the glass is half full but full of toxins.

I’m a Boomer. We’re getting a lot of flak for the condition of the world we’re leaving to the next generations. I spent my entire working life trying to make things better. I was there in 1988, the year Time magazine declared the Endangered Earth “Planet of the Year.” After the hottest, grubbiest weather ever seen. Ah, the good old days.

I won’t make this a science lesson on what we knew then and could have done to prevent what is happening now and what will happen by the end of this century if we keep going as we are, which seems likely. Just read the headlines. Even the mainstream press is now covering climate change. Which is probably another reason why I’m in a funk.

But this is a Rant, after all. What pisses me off is not so much what happened but why it happened.

We were lied to. Over and over. About so many things.

I grew up in a time when mass marketing was taking off, just like the Nazi-inspired rockets of NASA’s Mercury era. Post–World War II, the economy was booming with new products to make life easier for housewives like my mother, new ways of shopping in overstuffed grocery stores, bigger and fancier cars every year, sexy new cigarette brands endorsed by doctors, nuclear power that would be “too cheap to meter.”

Lies. All of them lies. It wasn’t just that all this progress was bad for our health and the air and water we depend on, but that those promoting these products knew they were bad. They fucking knew. And they didn’t care. And when they were called out by Rachel Carson and others, bits of progress were made like forming the EPA. But they also fought back, insulting Carson, belittling her accomplishments.

You name it, we were lied to. I want to keep this short, so I won’t list them all. But you live in this world. Absolutely everything wrong with it now is because someone somewhere lied. Racial inequality, war, recycling, PFAS (remember “Better Things for Better Living…Through Chemistry”?).

I’ve learned more about this world in the last eight years than in my previous 60, and what I’ve learned horrifies me. While I was toiling in communications to help people understand the importance of protecting forests, cleaning the air and water, healthful ways of eating, all for various nonprofits that operated on frayed financial shoestrings, corporations and even government agencies and elected representatives were colluding, not always covertly, to expand the power of profit over people.

I often think about the cost of a product. How many people died to make this? It gives you pause to think the plastic thingy, cheap clothing, or out-of-season produce meant someone somewhere died. In a poorly ventilated factory, unsafe sweatshop, or sunbaked field. People die so that I can live comfortably.

I could live with that if I knew companies cared about the people who worked for them. Even in my privileged world as a desk jockey, I worked for assholes who treated employees as replaceable widgets.

And even when the truth was known, and is known now, we either refuse to accept it or shrug and believe, well, I’ll just buy an air conditioner. I’ll vote for the least-worst choice. I’ll donate to a nonprofit operating with frayed financial shoestrings, when I get around to it.

But first, I’ll drive my gas guzzling SUV 20 miles over the speed limit to a big-box store to buy bird seed grown in monocultures on industrial farms using herbicides and pesticides. I want to help the birds I heard have been dying. Not sure why, but it’s a thing on Facebook. Besides, I like watching them with my bird-feeder camera. Oh, and I’ll also pick up some Roundup because I saw a dandelion in my five-acre lawn that needs to be golf-course perfect.

The tide is shifting, however. People are becoming more aware. Awareness leads to action, whether passive through voting or active through maybe not keeping that pristine lawn or driving that gas guzzler over the speed limit.

I maintain a thread of hope. It’s too late for future generations to have the childhood I had, but maybe it’ll be better than I expect. Maybe mine wasn’t really so great. Because of the lies.

So that’s been on my mind lately. How’s your day going?