The weather this year has been bizarrely ruthless. Boston just recently hit the most snowfall EVER in their history – which means this year saw more racist snowmen police officers than ever before. California is apparently one year away from running out of water completely, which will leave their wet t-shirt contests dreadfully dry. A dry t-shirt contest? Are you kidding me?? I’d rather play naked Twister in a Panamanian mosquito breeding ground!
Drought! Blizzards! Floods! Climate change is… fucked up. I didn’t want to believe it but then I saw a report from NASA saying “Climate change is fucked up.” Sure, NASA didn’t use those exact words,but they wanted to. I consider myself NASA’s id.
But rather than confronting climate change head on, it seems we’re dealing with it the same way you deal with walking in on your grandpa in the bathtub – by slamming the door and then sitting in a fetal position in a dark room trying to convince yourself there is some legitimate debate as to what you actually saw. Maybe it’s not global warming, maybe mother nature is just in heat. Maybe it wasn’t grandpa, maybe it was a flesh-colored bag of dirty laundry in the bathtub… singing John Denver to itself and looking at its nose hair in a handheld mirror. We don’t know. We can’t say for sure!
Why are we seemingly incapable of doing a god damn thing about climate change?! Why aren’t wehastily turning our entire economy over to solar, wind, tidal and geothermal energy – which is possible and would create MILLIONS of new jobs. One reason we dilly-dally is because when a furious raging forest fire or a completely unreasonable hurricane hits, the media hardly even mentions climatechange. Kind of like the way we used to celebrate Barry Bonds home runs without mentioning that his head was 4 sizes too big for a human being.
“Dad, what’s wrong with his head?”
“Shut up and enjoy the game, boy. He’s a national treasure! And a National Monument! Which is why he looks like Mount Rushmore!”
We look away from the problem also because it’s fucking scary. Climatechange is gonna mean a crazy new world – mainly…no more oysters and they’re delicious!
I’m actually kidding. Raw oysters are snot in a half shell. Don’t deny it! Oysters are the jazz of the food kingdom. Everyone’s just afraid to admit they don’t get it.
So climate change is scary but we don’t ignore other scary things. You get a disease, you try to deal with it. You don’t cross your fingers and hope the Republicans are right that you don’t REALLY have a disease.
“I don’t know – maybe that orange-faced senator who thinks Jesus rode around on dinosaurs has the answer. What – I shouldn’t trust him about my pancreatitus JUST because he thinks Ouija Boards and independent women are the work of the devil??”
But we look away now because this is a BIG problem that none of us can solve alone – we have to work together – and – most perplexingly – wecan’t shoot this problem with a gun. What the fuck is that?? That’s our thing! One answer is to shoot all the climate scientists who say it’s happening…but that would be 98% of all our scientists and we’d only be left with the STUPID ONES.
“Well boss, we have about 10 scientists left but they’re not very helpful because they’re busy trying to figure out where the poopy goes when you flush the toilet. Two say Puerto Rico, 8 say poopy heaven.”
We also look away because we think it’s impossible to fix this. Killing ourselves with unfettered capitalism is simply what needs to happen. This nasty beast we’re up against is simply too mighty. Yeah, but every great advancement in history was called impossible until it was achieved – ending slavery, achieving civil rights, achieving universal suffrage, ending Carlos Mencia’s TV show. It was all impossible. If Matthew McConaughey can go from being a hack rom-com doofus to being one of the most well-respected actors in Hollywood, then ANYTHING is possible.
Look, climate change is like a secretary who knows too much – there are options of ways to deal with it, you just have to be willing to get your hands dirty. (…Sometimes I feel my analogies reveal too much about me.)
We need to take our communities back from the corporate sleaze because they will never push for a green, sustainable path forward. Many cities and some communities are already doing this – whether itbe growing their food on rooftops, taking back their electrical grid, or growing their own Iggy Azalea’s in hydroponic celebrity gardens. There ARE ways forward that don’t involve us eating ourselves into oblivion – we just have to get pissed off and demand them.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
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