Tsunami warning

Oxfam reports that 85 people own the same amount of wealth as 50% of the world’s population. The other 7 billion of us fight over the rest of it like scurvy dogs.

John Kennedy said: “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

But a boat is not safe against a tidal wave.

Everything that we know and love is threatened by the ever growing tsunami of income disparity. Life as we know it is threatened with extinction, and there is nobody around to usher us two by two into the safety of an ark.

There is no high ground. This wave will cover the earth, leaving no stone unturned, and no plant untouched. There is no safe harbor. No seawall to protect us. No Coast Guard to perform daring rescues at sea. No Poseidon to save us; only the Kraken and Davy Jones’ locker.

We tie ourselves to the mast as the sirens call to us. The sirens sing of success and ownership, but they offer us only greed and servitude, if they don’t devour us instead. But whether we heed their call or not, we are still perilously close to the shore, carried by the powerful current. Either way, we will be smashed upon the rocks, shipwrecked.

The flood with surely sweep us away. We will sink to the depths like famed Atlantis. Drowned.

Many are torn from their moorings already. They have endured unemployment and foreclosure. Forfeiture of lands and theft of resources. A drought of opportunity and stagnant pools of fetid poverty that breed diseases.

Many others are doomed to be capsized, keel up, destined to end in the drink. The life jackets that we cling to will only serve as bright orange beacons to help locate and identify the dead. As if their identification will serve any other purpose than to verify the body count.

When the sea ebbs, all that will remain is silt and debris, the broken reminders of a once great human civilization. The eddies and tide pools will churn with death, while the sharks creep into the shallows.

Those who survive will be marooned. They will be flotsam and jetsam, strewn upon an empty beach. Our sand castles washed away, eroded by the crashing wave.

We are lost between the Scylla and Charybdis. To one side a beast that threatens to eat us alive. To the other, a swirling whirlpool - a cesspool - threatening to swallow us whole.

The Occupy movement gave a brief glimmer of hope. A spark that flashed for a moment, and then was gone. I see know that the flame was engulfed by the moist sea air; extinguished before a fire could be built to keep us warm. We are to be sunk under our own weight, as our bilge tanks erupt and overflow, and the crews dive overboard in panic. The engineers will be buried alive in the sludge. The navigators - blinded - pushing us into uncharted territory.

Our rudder is torn asunder, and we careen hither and yon, adrift. The ship cannot be righted, as we float helplessly in an unforgiving ocean. We burn under a blistering sun, circled by man-eating predators, and dying of thirst while surrounded by water.

Few of us man the lighthouses, and even we will eventually be swallowed. The buoys are off anchor, while men muddy the waters with the detritus of their foaming ideologies of liquidity and adventurous notions of piracy.

They ignore our warnings, while the wave rushes on and a perfect storm builds on the horizon. And all will be washed away, leaving nothing in it’s wake, but death and destruction.

And mankind will sleep with the fishes.