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.