ALL THINGS CHANGE AND WE CHANGE WITH THEM by Steve Savage "King of the Beasts"

ALL THINGS CHANGE AND WE CHANGE WITH THEM


I first lifeguarded at age 17 on Joline Avenue Beach, in the Summer of 1954.

Years later, in the 1960s, I became Long Branch's Chief Lifeguard and along with Dick Martin, Takanasee Beach Club Guard; Phil Huhn, Long Branch Beach Captain; Greg Farry, Beach Director, Bradley Beach, founded the Jersey Shore Lifesaving Association.

During my tenure, I witnessed a dramatic change in the integrity of our Ocean.

I remember, in the mid-1950s, there was an exquisitely-featured, darling girl of purest innocence, a LBHS classmate of mine, perhaps age 16 or 17, at the bloom of perfection in her beauty who, alone at night, would run down a long flight of wooden stairs to the unfootprinted sand below the bluffs, cast off her nightgown to stand naked upon the strand of the beach, where wave after wave would kiss the shore, then retreat back to an ocean sparkling with the diamonds of reflected stars.

How she must have delighted in the feel of the tiny sand crabs the waves left behind; they would scramble about her feet and tickle her toes, causing her to laugh that happy child's laugh that is the most beautiful of all music to God's ears; she would then joyously plunge, carefree, into the welcoming surf that was once our First Home.

Yesterday's dream has become today's nightmare. Now, when they report safe swimming conditions at the Jersey Shore, it's always announced in terms of "acceptable fecal content level." In other words, how much shit are you willing to swim in?

Who, in their right mind would eat any seafood caught or harvested in these waters, filled with raw sewage, rotting garbage, and deadly toxins from every kind of chemical company imaginable. We'll soon be gasping for air in direct proportion to the disappearance of Plankton, our primary source of oxygen, from our seas.

I have also personally witnessed in my lifetime the Shrewsbury River, my childhood playground, a river of beautiful crystal clear water, teeming with aquatic life of such vibrancy and health, transmogrify into a cesspool of putrefaction, that can no longer freeze over in winter.

The Norman Rockwellian joys of ice boating and ice skating at Branchport to Pleasure Bay, which once thrilled us as we played upon our real-life canvas, have been supplanted by filth, disease, sludge, grime, and muck.

The time has come to Pay the Piper for dishonoring our Great Mother. We never listened to the protests of the dolphins, whales, and other sentient mammals that inhabit our seas when they sacrificed themselves upon our shores in an effort to bring attention to what was being done to them.

Fools, believing they were assisting fellow mammals, drove those poor, sick and dying creatures back into the very poison from which they fled.

The world we once knew has changed and is currently undergoing a kind of mitosis, politically, economically, sociologically and most importantly, ecologically.

There is a feeling of helplessness, that there is nothing anyone can do about it.

In this realm of Quantum Non-Separability in which we inhabit and are inextricably bound up with one another, we believe that we can control events and circumstances before they go too far, when, in fact, there are anonymous Established Forces which have set us upon a "Deva Yama," i.e., a Path of No Return, beyond the Tipping Point, as it were.

We now find ourselves, standing on the bluffs above the "Plains of Kurukshetra," overlooking the place where the last Fight to the Death will take place. Warriors throughout the world are dividing into two camps in preparation for this Final Battle.

We have only two choices before us now: 1. To accept an ignominious, cowardly, Darfurian type death; the T.S. Eliotonian prediction that we will yield to the forces of extinction with a "whimper;" or 2. We can pick up the Sword and fight the noble and honorable fight of Warriors, where God's Will is glorified by Arjunian men of valor; those Dylan Thomasian noble knights who would rather "Rage against the Dying of the Light" than "go gentle into that good night."