It’s right under your nose … signs of our demise. And we are all contributors. Never before has allegiance to the common good been more important. I mean globally. Rather than common good, various forms of the “rugged individualist” culture have been pushed in our faces for generations.

Is this another “Chicken Little” rant? Well it’s almost too late for Chicken Little. He was strangled by us and left for dead. In our apathy and self-defeat, we step over his gasping body, metaphorically, of course.

Our complacent culture, another product of a corporate world, is leaving us a dying planet replete with: an obese baboon with an orange pallor in the White House, who’s tearing up the furniture; partisan, lying faces with surreptitious Rs stamped on their corporate-sculpted foreheads; misinformation in much of the media; and, overall, a divisive, uncivil public environment to boot.

Our oceans are dying and slowly ebbing higher. If we reside near the ocean and live for another twenty years, perhaps it will be up to our torsos. Our weather, more and more unpredictable — jet streams, up and down and contorted around due to higher rising temperature in Arctic and Antarctica than in mid-latitudes. We have preliminary signs of choking on air and water, on land and in oceans, where even seawater is becoming oxygen-starved.

Such weather uncertainties prompt buffoonish comments by Republican flunkies and Junior sons of such flunkies to mock global warming signs and predictions: a Oklahoma Republican Senator performs snow ball theatrics in Congressional chambers; Senator Joni Ernst disputes dire climate reports, “Our climate (weather?) always changes”; Rick Santorum, taking the cynical approach, “Climate scientists have a lot to gain financially from crisis.”

Researchers can almost hear an incessant “drip, drip” thunderously followed by glaciers sliding into the sea. This happening at both poles. In the Arctic, we see images of polar bears floating on islands of unmoored ice, forlornly looking for seals to feed on. West Antarctica is a series of islands covered by ice, melting faster than East Antarctica. Called WAIS, its melting would contribute about 20 feet to sea level, leaving millions of Emperor penguins to waste away in decades without nature’s sustenance

Meanwhile, our government is so out of control, Republicans do nothing in the Senate, one “Moscow Mitch” blocking everything, including dire legislative needs and problems, such as climate change, the opiate crisis, gun violence and obscene prescription drug prices. The exceptions are Trump-stamped legislation.

Meanwhile the Dem-controlled House fulfills much of our legislative shopping list, passing 298 bills in 2019 alone, most, to no avail as Mitch McConnell rejects any building-and-preserving-America measures, though a few pet Trump projects do pass.

Rather than consider rules for the upcoming Senate trial, McConnell is churning out conservative judges and refusing to follow a Constitutionally required open-minded approach to Trump’s indictment.

The Senate oath for the trial, “I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and law. So help me God.” Mitch McConnell will hold up his hand and mouth a dishonest oath, knowing he is lying before God. The day before impeachment, he proclaimed, “I am not an impartial Juror.” In fact he spent time with Trump lawyers openly planning how to whitewash the proceedings, letting the president and his legal team call the shots.

Everyday events, including his raucous rallies, show that we have a thoroughly corrupt madman in the White House who loves to weaponize cruelty. In a recent Battle Creek, MI rally, he suggested a recently deceased, John Dingell, who had served 50 years in the House, is in Hell, castigating and mocking Debbie Dingell (occupying John’s seat in the House) because she voted to impeach him.

Rather than consider any defense for two articles of impeachment passed Wednesday by the Democratic House with no Republicans voting for either article, Trump’s answer is a six-page angry letter full of grammatical errors, that mostly rails against Speaker Pelosi. It is something he said he wants to record for history to produce a “permanent and indelible record” of his thoughts on the process.

What is left of a once-viable democracy? We are losing precious oxygen and floundering under the combined weight of vulture capitalism’s continued feeding on the riches of our nation’s product.

The priority of corporate leadership is to marshal all their resources to prop up a Trump-led Republican Party, this in spite of Trump’s criminality and the dishonesty and lawlessness of the Republican apparatus. So the raid continues: Trump and the Party are helping the corporate elite  gorge on the nation’s wealth, progressively excluding all but their elite leadership.

It sounds like a modern soap opera, but unfortunately, it’s reality.

Chaos, then demise is built this way; time and again most dominant civilizations die.

But this time, it is planetary.