A winter haze has settled through our city this weekend -- it's cold dirty air. Something is happening to our climate. For days and days now we have had only sunny skies; the temp is in the forties at dawn but climbs to the seventies by mid-day.
Sunsets are muted pink and peach; the nights are silent.
New growth covers our yards, fields and hills. But something is wrong. This is supposed to be our rainy season.
Day after day, however, no rain comes. Memories of our last great drought return. Cars, houses, sidewalks all so filthy. People not showering as often. Jokes about the British. Public service ads advising "Shower With a Friend," yielding some of the worst pickup lines of an era.
I had an old car I seldom drove at that time. There were no parking restrictions in most San Francisco neighborhoods, so you could keep your vehicle in the same parking place for weeks or months.
Every few days, I'd check on my old junker, and marvel at the thick coating of black particulates. A drought is an extended bad air event. People start suffering from asthma and other respiratory disorders to such an extent that the City has to issue warnings that the vulnerable should stay indoors.
If one issue above all others has occupied my mind-share during most of my journalism career, it has been the environment. This, I'm sure, dates from my youth, especially my lonely years, from age 10-17.
These were years of illness, isolation, alienation, desperate shyness, and the construction of a thick protective shell that successfully kept others at a distance most of the rest of the first 40 years of my life.
Life unfolds in chapters, like a novel. There are stages we all must go through. It doesn't really matter how intelligent you are, or faithful, or honest, or well-intentioned. Emotional development is an awkward, life-long quest that none of us escape -- except, of course, the arrogant rich bastards who all too often rise to the top of companies, universities, political parties, churches, and most other institutions in our society.
As I've said and written many times, the problem with wanting to be number one is that, in any particular setting, only one person can win. That leaves legions of wannabes stuck in an inferior position.
This type of system leads to dysfunctional organizations, with The Biggest Asshole at the top, and many disgruntled mid-level executives below. Therefore, getting the top job is a mixed bag -- you are likely surrounded by sharks whose toothy smiles conceal the fact that those same smiles can (and will) kill you in an instant.
Et tu, Brute?
Darwin, one of greatest scientists, documented how only the strong survive. But Shakespeare, one of greatest artists, told the other side of the story.
To me, human ecology is as natural as that governing the rest of the animal and plant worlds. The only difference is that we, as a species, are so arrogant that we collectively represent that Biggest Asshole on the planet.
Thus, it remains for journalists, activists, lawyers, novelists, artists, poets, and other truth-tellers to bring the mighty to their knees, so that the truest among us -- the meek, the unassuming, the kind, and the compassionate -- do indeed inherit this earth, and share it with all the other creatures and plants that inhabit this paradise with us.
Should we fail, climate change will render everything we know as dust, and in my view, rightly so.
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1 comment:
If only the strong are to survive, then I would venture to guess it was the strong who survived the last great climate change...the ice age; despite science, technology, religious systems, and Big Brother, those humans made it through very desperate times. Let us not also forget the climate conditions that occurred (coincidentally?) in the same time period of the great depression. Come to think of it, the climate changes that occurred during the Irish potato famine, as well. (It snowed in the summer in the U.S. at that time!)
Does it really matter that we humans may have sped up the cycles of climate change? Which are after all totally out of our control, and it is this loss of perceived control that causes much unnecessary fear and distraction from things that we really should be finding of greatest importance.
Humans, like all other life forms on this planet, are just here. We, they, exist...it is that simple. And to think otherwise are just mental exercises in futility.
I would venture to say, that, in the natural flow of geologic time...if (and it is a very big if) the climate changed as dramatically as some of the "chicken little's" would like us to fear we would see that those in "power" are so disconnected from the skills to be self sufficient (in the sense of survival) that, well...natural selection will weed them out.
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