Things are not looking that rosy
Wow, things are not looking that rosy for the survival of homo sapiens, along with many other species these days, eh? This summer is making clear that all the projections about the imminent onset of undesirable effects of climate change on weather and climatehave proven to be way too optimistic.
From 120° heat in British Columbia, (where wildfires in the dense forests have wiped out at least one whole town) at a time of year when it should be cool and mild, to the WAY too early onset of the Southeast’s hurricane season, while here in California, where fire conditions are already what we would expect to see in late August, we are all hoping and praying for mercy from this year’s fire gods. As I write this, I’m waiting for updates on a brand-new fire out in redwood Valley.
One would think that times of adversity like this would bring people together; just as the whole world came together to defeat fascism during World War II (even though we had been allowing our plutocrats to nurture it for many years), but instead we find quite the opposite.
There are two ways to react to worldwide threats to any hope of preserving some kind of decent human existence; people can either reach out to their fellow human beings and formulate a united plan of attack on the problem, or come
up with some simplistic explanation of their challenges that blames one particular group for one’s problems. Then one no longer has to think through the complex details of addressing whatever the issue is, and can instead focus on hating the bogeyman that one has created.
In the wake of Trump’s four years of criminal collection of emoluments, inexplicably never brought before any kind of bar of justice, it seems as if our country has been bifurcated by this evil Pied Piper into two warring camps. The smaller of those camps has lied its gullible followers into disregarding all the evidence that their eyes and intellects might provide and to blindly follow whatever nonsense is being spewed that day by their Dear Leader.
Even though this bizarre cult following of a laughable combed-over clown is a distinct minority of the country, they have the tactical advantage of being utterly without scruples; they are right out front about the fact that the only way that they can hope to win elections is with massive targeted disenfranchisement of their fellow citizens. Frighteningly, since the GOP stole what should have been a routine appointment of a Supreme Court justice by Obama, the Orange Man was allowed to appoint 3! of the most fervent boot-licking lackeys of the super wealthy and corporations to the court, all of them relatively young, so we can look forward (if that’s the right term) to decades of their devotion to the unfettered rights of the powerful to work their will over the rest of us.
More and more, the situation in this country is beginning to remind me of Rwanda, during the genocide. Instead of Fox News’s 24/7 drumming of right-wing nonsense into their listeners, they had some kind of similar hate medium that appealed to every hot button; do your public duty, stand up for your community, kill the “insects”, or your neighbors will look down on you. Of course the whole problem was created by the country’s colonial past, where the colonizers patronized the smaller Tutsi ethnic group, empowering them to manage the colonizer’s exploitation of the much more populous Hutus.
Perhaps it will not come to quite as ugly a situation as occurred there, where exhausted Hutus would chop the Achilles’ tendons of the captives they were too exhausted to slaughter with their ma
chetes, so they can get back to that business in the morning, and they will not be able to get far overnight, but I continue to be shocked by the madness of 70% or so of republicans( a misnomer at this point, as the Republican Party has disappeared along with