The Beginning of The End

 I titled a journal of 2020 blog postings, “The Beginning of the End, or The End of the Beginning”.  But the more I read about the two subjects, the more convinced I become that we are truly at the Beginning of the End. The End of What you might ask? Well, the Beginning of the End of the World, I might reply.

Every day now, I read about some new Climate Change fact. A scientist is predicting that the Southwest US might hit 150 degrees in the near future. And another doctor was speaking of treating someone who fell on a sidewalk, and the sidewalk temperature was so hot that he was actually Burned, and required burn treatment. And that made me even wonder about doing something simple, like taking your dog for a walk, and the dog’s feet becoming burned or the dog simply ran away from the walkway because it was simply too hot.

And then the waterways around the Florida coastline rose above 100 degrees. So, what does that do to the sea life?

And all of the predictions suggest that these seemingly drastic daily temperatures were actually cooler than we may ever see again during this season.  From the New York Times:

“Last month, the planet experienced its hottest June since records began in 1850. July 6 was its hottest day. And the odds are rising that 2023 will end up displacing 2016 as the hottest year. At the moment, the eight warmest years on the books are the past eight.

“The extreme weather which has affected many millions of people in July is unfortunately the harsh reality of climate change and a foretaste of the future,” Petteri Taalas, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, said in a statement. “The need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions is more urgent than ever before.”

The world has entered what forecasters warn could be a multiyear period of exceptional warmth, one in which the warming effects of humankind’s continuing emissions of heat-trapping gases are compounded by El Niño, the recurring climate pattern typically associated with hotter conditions in many regions.”

So, Climate Change is here. The Climate HAS CHANGED. It is no longer arguable.

But then what do I read? Well, the Republican Party is not so sure. Yep, that’s right. In the middle of a catastrophic global climate crisis, the republicans seem to be imagining that Biden’s Impeachment would easily Trump Climate Change. Yeah, why would we wish to actually do anything to defer the worst effects of climate change? Well, for one thing, then we would have to acknowledge we were wrong and Climate Change is real. And republicans no longer do that—acknowledge errors.  No, but my next guess is that, for their next move, they will acknowledge Climate Change, but blame it all on Biden and the Dems.  Yeah, if only Joe had been paying attention when the scientists told him that industrial carbon emissions were a major cause of Climate Change.  But instead, Joe was going full time on Trump, and inventing stories about him, and so was way too busy to devote any energy to Climate Change.  So, it’s all Joe Biden’s fault.

And I sit here watching this growing crisis as I continue aging out of existence. Yeah, at 88, I watch all this with even more sense of terror than were I only thinking of my own age-related demise.  Lots of stuff goes on in your head when you suddenly enter your late 80s, 88 in my case.  Seems as though every time I open a news article, it begins telling me about someone I know who has just passed into the Netherland.  Sometimes it’s even broader. Carol and I watch routinely reruns of a British show called “Are You Being Served?” It ran many years ago and the series was on the air between 1972 and 1985. Turns out everyone on the show has now passed away. And at least some on the show were “young” (now to be fair, they were “young” sometime in the 1972-1985 period). Still, we continue to watch this program, where everyone has now passed on. Hmmm, that’s weird.

So this Death thing seems all around us.  When I was young, people periodically passed on. But then after a period of sadness, that was over and we went back to normal life.  Now, we seem surrounded. And added to that perception, this Climate thing has begun weighing in. It’s now a new element. And storms are more ominous, because they bring more destruction, real or imagined with them.  A whole new era seems upon us, and that new era is not promising, for our entire globe.

So, republican stupidity is just one added element in this new doomsland era we seem to have entered.  To be fair, given my mindset about the Climate Doomsday, republicans seem almost irrelevant. Like they really have passed on and are merely one more poisonous element in our threatened globe.

I wish I could break out of this messy thinking process. But instead, daily, it grows worse. Mainly because I’m old and will likely soon die anyway. But also, even if I escape for a while, it merely gives me more time to watch the gradual disintegration of our entire planet. And republicans are simply bit players in their own doomsday play, a charade of life’s evil playmakers. So play on all you idiot republicans. You are playing to an audience of idiot-malenfants, who will soon disappear from the planet anyway. 

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 [Ma1]

Traveling is Good

Ahhh, the 4^th, the 4^th. Thinking back, on July 4^th, 1955, we had been married for two days, and we were now aboard a flight on an airline now extinct. I thought it was World Airways, but I can no longer find a reference to such a name. At any rate, it was a prop passenger plane that flew us from LaGuardia Airport in New York to San Francisco in 14 hours. I think it stopped 6 times. We left New York around Midnight, arriving in San Francisco in midafternoon. Say 1-2 PM California time.  Ah, those were the days.  There were of course no jet planes in that era. So most flights were longish.  This flight was Carol and my first time aboard an airline. Oh I had traveled from coast to coast several times.  For my first, I took a Greyhound bus that took me 4 days. But I traveled several times thereafter. But we students devised a slightly different method of traveling from coast to coast. We would find someone who wanted a car driven across the country. Sometimes it was another student who wanted some help driving and we would drive with two people in the front seats and one snoozing on the back seat. Once, we drove the whole way (3000 odd miles) in 79 hours.

So that plane trip was a bit of a stunner. Imagine being aboard a vehicle that left the ground and moved in the open air.  Wow, what a concept.  But just when you imagine that a 14 hour flight was really long, I have to remember our flight from LA to Sydney in 2001, which was just over 15 hours, not counting the six hours it took to get to LA from the East Coast.

Oh, traveling has been such fun.  And I need to remember my childhood, where, until I was 18, I had never traveled more than about ten miles from my home base in New York City.  We didn’t even own a car, nor did so many of our New York City counterparts.  Who needed a car when you never went anywhere beyond a couple of miles away from home base, and buses and subways were so readily available? Our standard Sunday afternoon travels were a subway from Second Avenue Manhattan to Jerome Avenue, the Bronx.  Cars?? I think not.

But that flight with the two of us from LaGuardia to San Francisco began our life pattern of serious traveling by car, plane or train.  I am always a bit surprised at how we turned into world travelers, given our stunted early travel days, where neither of us had ever traveled more than maybe ten miles from our home base.

At the end of our first year of marriage, we were faced with the chore of moving to the LA region, since my first job out of Stanford was as a flight test engineer with the Firestone Guided Missile Division in downtown LA. We moved to Garden Grove, a little place 26 miles away from my work in LA.  And during that first year, we didn’t move about much, as we explored the smoggy world of the LA region. Oddly, we lived there six months before we discovered that, when the smog cleared a bit, you could actually see mountains.  I think that might be when we decided that perhaps the LA region was not really where we would choose to work and play for our new married lives.  And so we moved back up to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I began working with Lockheed on the Polaris missile.

Now there, we had some family. My mom lived there and my sis and her family.  So, we only traveled a bit in California, mainly to places like Lake Tahoe. But then, after six years at Lockheed, I joined a consulting firm doing planning work for the Air Force to help plan and control the development of the Minuteman Missile. In that job I traveled extensively, while my wife and kids enjoyed life in downtown San Francisco. So, I got to see much of the country, while my family stayed home. But then my boss called to ask me whether I would be interested in moving to a new gig in New Delhi, India. We had just received a contract to send four consultants to India, to work with the Planning Commission on planning new large public sector projects. I asked my wife and she said, “sure, why not?”

And so our serious traveling began in earnest. Through that opening, we traveled to India, but it was as though the world of global travel was now open. We visited over 30 countries. After we returned four years later, we traveled more about America.

And so what, right? Well, one of the things we have learned with all this traveling, is that folks are different everywhere you go, but also, they are the same. Human beings react in similar ways. Whether you are white or black, or any of the other colors we humans don, we remain humans. Depending on how we are raised and with whom we interact, we may react to stimuli differently. I guess that’s how racists arrive at that dreadful status. But not everyone is a racist as it turns out.  We all need certain stimuli, we all need to eat and we all need to consume water. We also, all need love and friendship. It all depends on what we focus on and when that determines how we look to other folks.  But key here is that the people who live in China, or Bolivia, or Thailand or Wyoming all have similar needs. Arguably, they could all be great friends, if they would only let that happen.

So try folks. Try love before hate. It works better for all of us.