We’ve been told for generations that this is the time of the year to be thankful. It’s an easy exercise if you stick your head in the sand. It’s more difficult if you pay attention to the daily (hourly?) horrors unfolding here and across the globe.

We don’t live in customized terrariums, although with growing inequality it sure feels like it. We’re all connected — hawks, hippos, hammerheads, honeybees, hydrangeas, hemlocks, and Homo sapiens. We thrive or wither together, even if we refuse to recognize that fact.

Unfortunately, the betrayal of the American Dream by political creatures enraptured by the wealth class have allowed predatory vulture capitalism to suck the life out of this country and the world. The current D.C. regime is determined to steal even more.

The wealthy are permitted to gobble up more and more while protected from paying their fair share, because the United States is rapidly becoming a playground for the filthy rich, especially of the white, racist variety.

For instance, the country’s biggest recipients of food stamps aren’t “welfare queens” driving Cadillacs or “lazy people” relaxing on Barcaloungers, but corporations such as Amazon (net profit in 2024 of nearly $60 billion), Walmart (about $15 billion), McDonald’s ($8.2 billion), and Dollar General ($1.1 billion) that don’t pay their employees a livable wage or provide decent benefits.

Their employees are among the top beneficiaries of federal aid programs such as food stamps and Medicaid, according to a 2020 study. The 91-page study also found that about 70% of the 21 million federal aid beneficiaries worked full time.

Walmart — owned by the Walton family, whose net worth is $432.4 billion — receives more than a quarter of all Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) dollars spent on groceries.

Middle- and low-income taxpayers buttress the decadence of the wealthy.

The corporate world, which relies on taxpayer money to help compensate its underpaid workers, is allowed to internalize profits and externalize costs. For example, tens to hundreds of billions of tons of pollutants are spewed and dumped annually in the United States. This pollution comes with a smorgasbord of adverse impacts and costs, but virtually none of the consequences are felt by the corporations profiting off the contamination of air, soil, and water.

While the fossil fuel industry pays its employees better than the Walton family, we sacrifice neighborhoods, drinking water supplies, farmland, and people so we can guzzle its filthy products.

A quarter of the world’s population lives within 3 miles of operational fossil fuel infrastructure, potentially threatening the health of some 2 billion people and countless ecosystems, according to a new report by Amnesty International.

It gets worse, according to “Extraction Extinction: Why the Lifecycle of Fossil Fuels Threatens Life, Nature, and Human Rights.” Nearly 465 million people, including 124 million children, live within 0.6 miles of fossil fuels operations. The report found that 18,300 coal, methane, and oil sites are currently distributed across 170 countries, occupying a vast area of the planet’s surface. Another 3,500 new sites are currently proposed or under development that could force 135 million more people to endure emissions, flares, fumes, and spills.

Proximity to drilling wells, processing plants, pipelines, and other fossil fuel facilities elevates the risk of cancer, heart disease, respiratory problems, premature birth, and death.

“The fossil fuel industry and its state sponsors have argued for decades that human development requires fossil fuels. But we know that under the guise of economic growth, they have instead served greed and profits without red lines, violated rights with near-complete impunity, and destroyed the atmosphere, biosphere, and oceans,” Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, told The Guardian.

I hope during this season of gratitude you give thanks to the low-wealth people and wildlife “living” in the heavily contaminated sacrifice zones that power our wastefulness and gluttony, because this country’s biggest hogs certainly won’t be.

During this season of thankfulness, the Mad King uses the White House as a set for the Home Shopping Network, golfs, hosts Gatsby-like parties, and dines with finance industry psychopaths as his regime withholds food assistance from millions, forcing them to rely on overwhelmed food banks and community generosity to feed their families.

About a month ago, I wrote a piece, in recognition of Halloween, about the real-life monsters — many of whom we elect — stripping people of their civil rights, worsening the climate crisis, hoarding resources, sledgehammering health care and education, governing for personal enrichment and the wealthiest 10%, and terrorizing people of all ages at school, at work, and in their neighborhoods. (This blog post documents the evilness MAGA unleashed in Chicago.)

A frequent ecoRI News commenter, who routinely defends MAGA policy, believes ICE is following the law, and blames Democrats and offshore wind turbines for everything, left this remark:

“Seriously Frank I am very worried about you. The doom and gloom of your articles continues to get worse. Please try to find the beauty in life. After all, our time on this planet is limited. Spend time with your love ones, watch a sunrise, a sunset, watch the fawns frolic in the yard, sit by the ocean and listen to its roar, and find the beauty. It is there you just have to look.”

Of all the comments this poster leaves, this especially selfish one saddened me. I had been thinking about it for a while, so I decided to address the faux concerns about my well-being.

I very much enjoy the beauty in life. But I’m also terribly troubled by how effortlessly we annihilate entire ecosystems, by clear-cutting forests, overfishing the ocean, paving over green space, crushing biodiversity, and stomping out the nonhuman life we don’t farm, pat, ride, or cage.

Unless your idea of beauty is parking lots, data centers, fulfillment warehouses, fossil fuel infrastructure, cars, regal ballrooms, and gold-plated oval offices, the natural beauty of this world will continue to rapidly disappear if we don’t leave/make room for all the other life that doesn’t waste it’s time pecking at handheld distractions.

Our time on this planet is indeed limited, and we collectively spend it raping and pillaging Mother Nature. We chop down healthy trees because we hate the sight of fallen leaves. We fuss over lifeless lawns. We spray poisons around like the Swedish Chef on methamphetamines.

To wit: The MAGA regime is moving forward with approvals for pesticides containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) as an active ingredient, dismissing concerns about public health and environmental impacts. These pesticides tainted with forever chemicals will be used on Big Ag broccoli, potatoes, and romaine lettuce. The regime has also announced plans to relax a rule requiring companies to report all products containing PFAS, and has proposed weakening drinking water standards for the potentially toxic chemicals.

I spend plenty of time with my family, including my 13-year-old and 9-year-old nieces. Since humankind has encroached on and wiped out the habitats of other species, relentlessly dumped pollutants into the air, soil, and water for two and a half centuries, and changed the planet’s atmosphere and climate, I’m concerned my nieces will be left to enjoy the wonders of nature through virtual reality goggles or “Nature” reruns, if PBS isn’t banned. We are solely responsible for the planet’s sixth mass extinction.

I do watch “fawns frolic in the yard.” Since every scrap of open space in our Portsmouth, R.I., neighborhood — with the exception, at least for now, of wetlands — is being turned into oversized second/vacation homes powered by oil and propane (no solar panels or heat pumps for these unaffordable and gated residences), my wife and I have counted up to 17 deer at once in the backyard of our modest home, which is increasingly being surrounded by Miami-like extravagance.

With the neighborhood’s green space being replaced by concrete, pavement, lawns, privet, and nonnative ornamentals, deer and other local wildlife such as coyotes have fewer places to shelter and feed. Hungry deer frequently dine in our yard.

When we moved in eight years ago, what wasn’t lawn was mostly multiflora rose and oriental bittersweet. Much of the lawn and those invasives, as well as others, have been replaced by two red maples, a swamp maple, an Atlantic white cedar, a river birch, a tulip tree, witch-hazel, sweet pepperbush, butterfly weed, milkweed, cardinal flower, asters, and other native species.

We don’t mind sharing, as the birds get all of the blueberries, the rabbits a lot of everything, and the coyotes many of the pears I shake from the tree. The squirrels don’t need my assistance in picking the fruit.

As the years have passed and development grows, the deer have come to rely on our yard more for food. They didn’t pay any attention to the first red maple we planted, but the second, added a few years later, needed to be fenced off after it was browsed on. They ignored the raspberries, which are close to the house and the road, for the first several years but have spent the past two munching on the bramble. The elderberry bushes have always been their favorite.

Our collective callousness is making deer, coyotes, and most wildlife homeless and hungry. It’s doing the same to many humans.

We live a 5-minute walk from the East Passage of Narragansett Bay. At the end of the road that leads there, is a public/private marina that is packed with massive powerboats and yachts when their owners aren’t spending their time in Florida or the Caribbean. The roar I hear is from the outboard and inboard motors spewing greenhouse gas emissions into a rapidly warming atmosphere.

In the eight years we’ve lived here, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a sailboat docked there. The smallest boats belong to the Portsmouth Police and Fire departments.

The ocean’s beauty is being ruined by destructive fishing practices, such as bottom trawling, and acidification being caused by the burning of fossil fuels. It and the diverse life it supports, including our own, are being poisoned by plastics, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, and all the other human-made nastiness that has been and still is being flushed and washed into the planet’s marine waters.

Our me-first way of living treats most of us as nothing more than consumers, laborers, and/or political pawns. Our society makes little to no investment in the future of our species, and burns through the natural world as if some fulfillment center will just deliver more to our front door.

As long as my infant isn’t being ripped from me through a smashed car window, my kid’s preschool isn’t being stormed by untrained goons with guns, my due process isn’t being erased, my house isn’t flooded, wildfire hasn’t destroyed my home, I don’t live in a community being polluted for profit, and I can afford health care and food, I can just sit back and smell roses.

The fact is one can — and should — enjoy sunrises and sunsets and also share concerns about the unsustainable and cruel superhighway we are speeding down. This dead end is actually making it harder to find the beauty in this world.

We need to slow down and exit now.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.