Clearly, we are in global denial about who we are and what we’ve done. Sure, there are bits and pieces of recognition here and there. The Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., the various Holocaust museums, the Chinese dissidents who just won’t shut up.

But for the most part, for most of us most of the time, life in the new millennium is business as usual. Leave the 200,000,000 dead to the dead. I’ve got to get through the day, which is hard enough. Never mind the stench. Never mind the hidden, future stench of 50,000 nuclear warheads still in place, waiting. Never mind the only partly hidden, future stench from the festering wound of our violence to the planet itself. Gaia in pain? Oh come now, get serious.

We are the walking wounded of the 20th century, and we don’t know it. Traumatized for sure. Possibly already gangrenous (that remains to be seen).

As any healer will tell you, the first step toward health is to recognize and accept the problem.

For final proof of the depth of the wound and the denial, I ask you to remember that last months of 1999. Perhaps I missed something, but I recall that time as one of celebration (Look what we have achieved!) tempered only by the annoying fear of a possible computer bug. I do not recall it as a time of lamentation, regret, introspection. Rather, it was a psychopathically ego-driven hymn of self-praise: