A Permanent Revolution

Today I drove up to Sentinel Peak Park and looked out at the dry, dusty basin of urban sprawl that is Tucson. From the top you can look out over the paved wasteland that's indicative of humanities desire to spread out, consume, alter and dominate the whatever it sees . 50,000 years ago, early man went to the top of a similar hill, saw what was on the other side and thought "damn, but that would look nice with a copy of the strip mall we have over on our side." And he proceeded to invent the means of building that replica of the great proto-strip mall, complete with a matching pharmacy as the capstone.

Are we now looking over another great hill in history? Can we see the approaching destruction of our natural resources? Can we stop the pushing forth of humanities hand into the last vestiges of the natural wilderness that lies on the other side of the hill? Or have we gone too far? Are we victims of the way we were born? Will I ever stop asking questions in this post?

I have no answers. I don't see the exits anymore, covered as they are by landfills and toxic waste and acidifying oceans. The great wave of hope that rushed across the land in the sixties, crested and pulled back didn't wash the land clean but left the waste, greed and corruption of previous generations behind.

A revolution, by its very nature, turns and turns, always coming back to the beginning. Can we have a permanent revolution or only suffer the failures of previous turns of the cog every chance we have? I have no answer, but I think we should be searching, for is it not humanities great quest "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield?"