Burning Down the Planet

 I walk outside and I feel immediately like I am on some different planet. I have kept listening to them tell us about Climate Change, but mostly I guess I have been hearing what I want to hear; which is that, climate change is definitely happening, just not today. Yeah, ice sheets are melting, but I don’t live in the Arctic Circle, or Antarctica.  So, I appreciate what you are saying Greta, but right now I have to pour myself a nice glass of red wine.  Last Tango in Halifax is on and I am really hooked.

And then I catch a glimpse of an article in the Guardian about some town in the west sinking, as in sinking over 11 feet.  Yeah, a whole town is sinking. Why? Well, it seems they have been pulling water out of their underground reservoirs, and that water has not been replaced due to dry weather in the West. So, the entire structure underneath the town is falling down, causing the ground up above to also begin collapsing.  Who ever heard of such a thing, right?  Towns might drown, but that’s their own fault, right? They shouldn’t have built so close to the water. But collapsing into the soil beneath??? What the hell is that all about?

 And then we have all the western wild fires. I looked at a picture of the skyline from somewhere in San Francisco. And it was all red, and you couldn’t see very far. And I thought, God, this is way worse than looking out the window in LA during the 1950s.  That was smog, and we all knew what caused smog. Yeah, your dumbass car which had no decent exhaust system, so cars were practically belching smog out their tailpipe. But this picture was different. It somehow looked like the world was on fire.  And who could I blame??? Some dude smoking and then tossing his still-lit cigarette into the weeds??  OH, no, right, they were caused by Jewish Space Lasers. That dudette Marjorie Taylor Greens told us all about that.  And she must know right? I mean people voted her into Congress, so she must know these things.

Oh, and then I started reading about the weather in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver—110 to 116 degrees F. No, how is that possible? I’ve been to all those places and the temps never climb above, what 75??? I mean, they aren’t New Delhi in June, right??

So, what the hell is going on anyway? I guess I could cope were they to tell me that, since it was January (it isn’t) we should expect four feet of snow tomorrow.  I mean, I get that. So, I have to take my snow shovel tomorrow and really haul ass out there to dig some big time channels, so we could actually emerge from our house. But no. Instead, they are telling me about some unstable upper air that is likely to cause locally torrential rainfalls of maybe 12 inches or more. They weren’t sure, but maybe.  Everywhere I turn this summer, I see some cataclysmic weather event. It’s like someone turned a switch and suddenly climate change was turned on for good. Greta, did you turn that switch? I mean, warning us via the telly is one thing, but you wouldn’t just suddenly switch it on would you??

Part of my problem is I’m now really old . . . by any definition. And one characteristic of being really old is that lots of things now either depress me, or frighten the crap out of me.  And, trust me, this weather pattern is definitely one of those things.  I read about houses floating away due to some river flooding. I understand that we live in an old house—even older than me for god’s sake—and that extreme waterfall, like 5 inches of rain, will cause the basement to begin flooding. Once I had to spend nearly 11 hours in the basement vacuuming the water til it finally stopped coming in.  So, yeah excess rainfall brings me to the freaking out stage. I’d much rather shovel snow, than vacuum water.  Why? I don’t know.  I just really hate vacuuming water.  Maybe it’s cuz the snow just sits there, and then eventually it goes away when the sun shines on it and warms things a bit. Whereas the water coming into the basement gets things wet that shouldn’t be wet, and then they rot or smell. Or it shorts out electrical connections. So, with water in the basement, it’s a fight against time. You get the water out, or it will screw you big time in some way.  Now, to be fair, if we just had an empty cellar, or a crawl space, I doubtless would not care. But someone, a long time ago, decided to create a useful space down there, and so we adopted that space. We have a furnace, a freezer, a refrigerator, my artsy supplies, a washer and dryer. So lots of stuff. And so, extremely heavy rain freaks me out.  More so now that I’m really old.

But it isn’t just the fear of a big thunderstorm. I mean, periodically, summer produces thunderstorms, and occasionally, one could be really big.  No, it’s that this is the summer of our cataclysm. Climate change arrived with a bang.  And I’m thinking, OK, this is our World War IV. Apparently, when a human is born, part of the deal is that that human will have to live through some big time catastrophic event, probably more than one.  I’m not sure what it was like to be born into, say the 16^th century. Likely, as now, it mattered whether you were born into a family with lots of money, or into a family of slaves, or farm workers.  But everyone was likely to have to live through some period of awfulness.

So, let’s see. I was born in the 1930s. And what did we have then? Oh, yeah that Great Depression thingie. So much fun for my mom. And then we had that period when ordinary Germans ignored what a dude named Hitler was saying, and so they installed him as their leader, so he could go on to kill six million folks and cause the entire world to engage in that killing field called a World War.

And then suddenly that awful thing ended as I became a teenager, and we had that period called the 1950s.  Quiet, well aside from that kerfuffle in a far-off place called Korea.  To be fair, there was a lot of saber rattling, and lots of people yelling at one another—“if you don’t listen to me I might shoot off a big missile and blow you up!” But nobody did.

And so it went on, with shootemups here and there, but always limited. Oh yeah, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, but that’s just life in the Big City, huh? And then sometime during the 1970s, amidst the messiness of life in this World, folks called scientists began yelling that we needed to do something to reduce something called carbon emissions. If we didn’t, the global temperature would begin rising, and then the world would be at risk of cataclysmic failure. And the monied sets just guffawed and said, “oh crap those damned scientists are trying to get us to change our ways. And we ain’t gonna do that, cuz it would get in the way of our making money. And that ain’t gonna happen”.

And so, we did nothing, cuz the folks with the money control everything.  And now, 50 years later, ice sheets are melting, towns are collapsing, forests everywhere are burning down, making the problem worse. And yeah, the average temperatures are rising. So, apparently, the scientists were right, huh? But meanwhile, the Sacklers, and the Jeff Bezo’s, and the rest of the superwealthy are continuing to act in ways designed to destroy our world.  And then Portland, Oregon hits 115 degrees of summertime temperature, and forests are again burning down the world.

So, are we doing anything? Oh, I forgot, that group called the Republican Party decided to go into a permanent state of mental breakdown, by deciding to elect either the terminally stupid, or mentally unstable to its leadership.  And so we have Donald Trump, and Mitch McConnell, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Rudy Giuliani (yeah, he of the melting head) and others of that ilk, making believe they are actually 1936 Germany.  And they are looking for their own Adolph, or at least their own Benito Mussolini, so they can embark on the final destruction of America via the cataclysmic climate change event. So, it’s that “Decline and Fall of” thingie. Remember that? So much fun.

So, the rest of us get to just sit back and watch it all on the Telly, or maybe on our smartie phones.  Voting?? Well, no, that republican bunch are changing all the rules, so you won’t be able to vote. They do so hate it when people actually vote.  Ta ta folks. Enjoy this summer of our discontent. It may be our last. Or not. We’ll see.  Remember . . . 74 million people in America actually voted for Donald Trump. Let that sink in. Hahahahahahaha.

Being in the Right Place at the Right Time

Two things, Climate Change, and Man’s Inhumanity to Man, have begun to weigh into the world’s make-up.  Carol and I have begun remarking about timing and how we have actually been fortunate. Now we are old, at this age, old by any definition. So, we don’t have a long term horizon staring at us. Instead, I guess, we have a bundle of gratitude, because the world allowed us to do and see things that might now be less easily accessible.  Now, to be fair, many of these same things continue to be available, so I would counsel folks to take notice. Before your own personal time runs out, act. Put that Bucket List to work and do and see the things you may have simply dreamt on.

Carol and I have been fortunate. We both originate in families that had limited resources. And we all know that resources often dictate what we do, or where we might visit.  Personally, I grew up in a broken family, with a working mom who worked hard to bring in the resources needed to feed and house her kids. Until I was about 12, I never ventured farther from Manhattan than say The Bronx.  And even after she moved us up to Rockland County to live in New City Park, it still kept me within ten miles of the city. So, I had not seen much of the world through my high school years.  Carol pretty much the same, although she lived just outside New York City.

And then I abruptly zoomed out of New York to reside for a time at Stanford, maybe 25 miles from San Francisco.  Imagine that.  And why would I do something as far-fetched as that? Well, my sister had dropped out of high school at Julia Richman to enter the work force during WW II. But she thought that both her brothers needed to go on to finish college. So, she convinced me to attend Stanford.  And so, suddenly I was resident on the West Coast of America. And guess what? Climate change had not yet dropped into the San Francisco Bay Area. So, we enjoyed reasonable day-time temperatures. And if there were forest fires they were relative rarities, unlike today.

But my point here is that timing is important, but action really is everything. We live on this spinning globe for a limited time. Some of us, perhaps most of us, will elect never to examine much of the globe, preferring instead to live a calm, limited life.  My own personal experience suggests that we might want to expand our horizons a bit and opt for a more expansive view of life on Earth. Seeing our globe is to better understand the humans who reside therein.

But, to return to my earlier premise, carrying out that more expansive view may be as much luck as energy levels.  The world continues to change over time, and much of that change is determined by humankind.

For example, many regions of our globe are beset by evil doers, trying to assert their control over ordinary folks. The Middle East is perhaps the prime example of that phenomenon. In 1964, we managed to travel to India and stop on the way in Beirut. It was really our very first excursion outside the United States. We found Beirut amazing. The people we met everywhere seemed happy and just delightful. Even our various taxi drivers seem to revel in happiness. The city was lovely and, for us, quite exotic.  But this was in 1964, as noted. Today, Beirut seems on the verge of collapse as a civilized place to live. It has been drawn into the cesspool of the Middle East miasma.  The entire Middle East seems a region to be avoided at all costs, even for a brief visit.

And then, beyond evil doers, we have the changing of our climate, due to inaction on the part of humankind, despite the increasing evidence, since at least the 1970s. Apparently we humans reject changing our behavior whenever it gets in the way of making money.  And we have been piddling around, mostly talking about the need for changing our behavior, while steadfastly rejecting any actual doing of change.  And while we have been chatting about the climate, the climate has actually been reacting to our collective stupidity.  Slowly but steadily, global temperatures have been inching upwards, sea ice at both poles has been melting, and weather extremes have been occurring more aggressively.  Forest fires, especially in our West, and throughout the Amazon basin have become a new norm, creating whole regions poised on the edge of disaster. Exactly how these phenomena will change our earth over the next 50 years is the subject of considerable argument between scientists and science deniers.  And it should be noted that the science deniers have become a larger and more aggressive collective, mainly fueled by big money, because climate action always suggests the need to change our ways—especially in the form of reducing carbon emissions. That always suggests changes in our technology, especially our automotive systems, and our energy development systems.

And as we argue, the planet does its own thing and begins to change, whether we like it or not.

Now these planetary changes have and will continue to affect regions of the planet. In our West, forest fires affect whole regions, changing the landscape, and modifying our ability to literally see through the mess that fires create.  In one area of California, a town is literally sinking, due to a geological phenomenon called subsidence:

“In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the farming town of Corcoran has a multimillion-dollar problem. It is almost impossible to see, yet so vast it takes NASA scientists using satellite technology to fully grasp.

Corcoran is sinking.

Over the past 14 years, the town has sunk as much as 11.5 feet in some places — enough to swallow the entire first floor of a two-story house and to at times make Corcoran one of the fastest-sinking areas in the country, according to experts with the United States Geological Survey.

Subsidence is the technical term for the phenomenon — the slow-motion deflation of land that occurs when large amounts of water are withdrawn from deep underground, causing underlying sediments to fall in on themselves.” 

With changes this dramatic, I begin to wonder about the future of towns and cities located along coastal areas. What will happen to Florida an entire region surrounded by an ocean that may well begin to capture the land, perhaps bringing it all underwater?  Similarly, cities like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle may well become threatened over time.

All of this is to suggest that we need to be paying attention. The world around us is changing in ways we do not yet fully comprehend. And some of that world may actually disappear, or be changed in ways that we cannot predict.

Two things occur to me as I write this challenging note. One is that perhaps the Greta Thunbergs of our world are correct. We must act to preserve our planet, or we will find ourselves overseeing its ultimate destruction.  I know, Greta is just a teenybopper, but she seems smarter than most of the fully adult humans who surround her on the planet.  She is warning us, because she will be one of the ones on the planet who may live to see the ultimate effects of our collective stupidity and inaction.

The other observation, which may be silly, is that, if you wish to see the planet, perhaps you might want to consider an earlier rather than later visiting schedule. Some places, as noted, seem unwise, because the resident humans seem too intent on killing anything that moves. But other places remain, for the moment, open to visiting humans. Perhaps earlier rather than later is my advice. Our planet may not be around forever.  So perhaps start doing your research now. Where have you always wanted to visit? Now may be the time.

Heaven or Hell

 I continue reading posts about heaven and/or hell. The most recent was one wherein the author was asking for your beliefs about Heaven. Do you believe in Heaven and do you think that’s where you are headed after you die? The responses were heartfelt, and almost always suggested that Heaven surely existed and that the responder definitely planned on their final stay there.

I suppose it is inevitable that any believer in the hereafter would believe they were scheduled to land in Heaven. I was pretty much alone in responding differently. My response was pretty much along the lines of, “well, the most likely explanation of what happens when your bodily system shuts down, is that you simply lose any awareness. You don’t really “GO” anywhere, because YOU no longer exist. And you don’t know any of that precisely because your brain no longer functions.  See, everything has gone dark, but you don’t even know that, because your brain is no longer functioning.”

In my view, it would be really horrible were you to be aware that your body and brain had gone dead. I mean, think of that. The only things that actually occur after your brain goes dead is that those nearest to you either place your body in some big box and then lower that box into a hole in the ground, and then cover the resulting hole with more dirt. Or they place your body on a cart that feeds into a fire, and your entire body is consumed, leaving behind a few ashes that are placed gently into a nice glazed container.  I would think one would not wish to be aware of such occurrences.

No, instead, folks seem to prefer believing that your brain simply switches tracks, and, somehow, disconnects from that Earth body, and then floats or transfers somehow into that other realm that folks call Heaven. And then “Life” just goes on, only this time there is no aging, or deterioration, or food intake, or really any bodily functions.  No, your brain simply continues to function without its body.  Only now, apparently, you have access to lost relatives, and even to other proto-humans who used to exist. I suppose then is how you begin to finally understand what that Life thing was all about.  Now, from my thinking, that kind of inside information would be really nice to have after you turn, say, 4 or 5.  Think of entering school armed with a complete understanding of what life is all about.  But then I assume everyone would just turn into a Buddhist, huh?

I have always had difficulty understanding the fairy tale of heaven and hell. On the one hand, it does seem passing strange that any superhuman intelligence would possibly have conceived of a system such as we seem to have.  That is, you are created as a tiny barely thinking creature and then acquire sets of thinking tools such that you are capable of remaining alive on this planet, despite the many passing threats tossed at you over your lifetime.  But then, just as you become reasonably capable of staying alive, your body begins to deteriorate and you begin to lose the very capability it took so long to acquire. And then, poof, it’s all over and you suddenly lose everything.  And that’s if you’re very lucky. Think of all those dudes whose systems fail before they have learned how to adapt, or they are struck down by some idiot-malenfant who has a gun (what God-like creature would have conceived of a gun?)

Oh, and then there’s the whole thing about relative brain power. So, instead of conceiving a system whereby everyone actually created and introduced to earth, would have reasonably comparable brain power, such that they all would have an equal shot at deducing what the atom was all about, we seem to have a system of vastly different brainpowers being assigned to creatures brought into being, quite randomly.

And it seems that the very ones whose brainpower was less than optimum are the ones who conceived of Heaven and Hell.  Yeah, I guess they spent their maturing time trying to decide how their lives would be better only after they were dead.

But this entire line of non-reasoning seems to arise out of a singular desire to control.  All religions are based on control, on paying attention to the religious leaders. It’s like a Giant Ponzi scheme, only the Ponzi Masters never get discovered, because you only find out after you’re dead, and then you don’t even know you have found them out. So, religion is all about a few folks being allowed to tell you how to live, and paying them off, i.e., you provide them with a reasonably nice living, some at the palatial level. In exchange for supporting them in the style to which they would like to become accustomed, they promise you this afterlife thing in Heaven. It would be a nice trade actually, were they able to deliver, but alas, they can’t, because they have no idea how to deliver.

And so we go on believing or disbelieving without any way to tell the difference in terms of The Payoff. It comes down to a simple idea. If you believe, you provide access to some dude’s control over you. You allow him (it’s mostly a HIM) to tell you what to do, and, in exchange, he provides you with this firm belief in the afterlife in Heaven.  If you disbelieve, you deny him that control, and you are free to act in any way you decide is ok for humanity.

And so we go on, with no way to ever determine who is right and who is wrong. Kind of a stupid thing, huh? It’s called LIFE on Earth. Fun.