Cruel Summer

Post-apocalypse entertainment and fears of nuclear war have conditioned us to envision the end of the world coming in a singular, catastrophic moment. Climate change is the real apocalypse, and it does not operate like that. It's a literal slow burn, something that has made it easier to ignore or put off, boiled frog style. 

Things have deteriorated enough this summer, however, that the horror of our future is sinking in with far greater clarity. It started with the choking air from Canadian wildfires, and continued with a deadly heatwave. In my early childhood, we had hot summers, but we also had mild summers, too. Now every summer is worse than the one that came before with no end in sight. Every wretchedly hot summer turns out to be cooler than any others we will experience in our lifetimes. 

For a long time it was easy to think of the consequences of climate change as part of the future, but now it is the present. We used to be able to think there was time to work with, now that time is up. Obviously we can still take action to prevent the very worst from happening, but at this point we know that even if we manage to make major changes, suffering will still come. 

There's also the despair of knowing those major changes won't happen. Communities around the country fight against solar and wind farms, including liberal ones. Conservative politicians and their related media still deny climate change, as do the masses of conservative voters. They will likely continue making light of it as more people die of heat stroke and the coasts flood. Creating legislation to deal with climate change in this environment, where corporate lobbyists also maintain a stranglehold, is impossible. I simply do not see any political solution coming. 

The ultimate cruelty of this summer is that right-thinking people are being forced to watch the world burn with no way of stopping it. Climate change is already drastically altering our physical environments, I think it also has the power to shatter our mental ones, too. 

Existential Dread on a New Jersey Sunday Drive

The radio can strike fear sometimes

My children were bouncing off the walls and my spouse needed a break so I took the kids out of the house in that aimless Sunday afternoon kind of way. Today was one of those visually stunning days that also happened to be too damn hot, when the world looks best from inside of an air conditioned car.

This was a tradition back when my kids were toddlers and needed to take a nap and the gentle rocking of the road would lull them to sleep. Now they stay awake, but quietly read books in the back while I listen to my favorite shows on WFMU (that part has stayed the same.)

Today, in honor of the death of Ric Ocasek, the DJ spun "Drive" by The Cars. A chill came over me as I drove the winding Morris Avenue as it wended its way from Summit to Millburn. It's not just that this is one of the most profoundly sad songs allowed on the charts in the dayglo lobotomy of Reagan era America. I had a slight real life connection to Ocasek (not worth discussing here), but also got news that a friend from my time in Texas died suddenly on Friday morning.

For some reason that feeling of dread drifted to thinking about Friday's climate strike. Driving through the sprawl I looked out at the way of life destroying life on earth. What will future generations think of our Sunday drives? Of our pop music reveries while the tailpipe belches poison into the air? I get the feeling that the suburbs of New Jersey will be like Nineveh and Tyre for future generations.

On the way home we ran into a traffic jam at a bridge over the freeway. Evidently a horrible crash left a truck overturned and a car on fire. People from the neighborhood were gathered on the bridge looking at the wreckage below. It seems to have barely made it into the local news. Just another day in our way of being, I guess.

In any case, my kids and I went to the Dairy Queen and enjoyed some ice cream. That made me forget this doomed world and all the people I've lost in recent years for a bit.

Stop Asking The Children To Save You

Marvin Gaye had it right. It's the responsibility of older generations to do right by the young.

Tomorrow brings the climate strike, an event that a lot of my students will be participating in. I am certainly proud of their choice to protest, but also miffed at the attitude of a lot of their elders.

This week my social media feed has exploded with stories about Greta Thunberg, the teenaged Swedish climate activist. I think what she is doing is fantastic, but those reporting on her and retweeting the articles frame her as some kind of child messiah. Likewise, much hay is made of how the young generation is going to set things right. I read this discourse and get sicker and sicker at heart.

What kind of irresponsible person looks at the world burning up, and then places the responsibility for solving that problem on the shoulders of a bunch of children? What kind of person looks at the DECADES of their own inaction and decides to conspicuously praise the efforts of the youth to sort out the mess they created?

This is the product of disordered minds in the possession of the people motivated by a strange brew of apathy and moral superiority. They want to signal that they are in league with the climate change movement, but they don't actually want to have to do any of the work themselves. This is politics as spectator sport, where merely rooting for the right team is extent of taking action.

We saw much the same with the rise in activism against gun violence after the Parkland shooting. All these media figures and well-meaning middle-aged liberals sitting on their ample behinds smiled and cheered how "the children will save us!"

What a load of absolute, unmitigated horse shit.

The future we are giving the youth gets worse and worse. Fewer opportunities for advancement, debt traps around every corner, declining life expectancies, their schools shot up, opioids easily available, their education reduced to a treadmill of standardized tests. Here's a thought: instead of expecting people to praise you for praising Greta Thunberg and David Hogg, why don't you get up off your lazy ass and fight for a change? Instead of expecting the children to save you, why don't you go all out to make better lives for the children? Your empty words of support are less than useless because they only feed our society's fatal complacency.

The Important Thing We Learned From the Debate That No One Will Talk About

Predictably, discussion of Tuesday's presidential debate has hinged around the boxing scorecard (Obama by TKO, in my opinion) and the usual array of sound-bite spin wars.  Many on my side of things are rightfully making hay with Romney's "binders full of women" remarks and the utter cluelessness that they revealed, and the Teabagger crowd is still trying to say that the president did not immediately call the attack on the Benghazi consulate an "act of terror."

These are significant issues, but I am amazed at how little people are discussing the concrete policy ideas of the two candidates, and the degree to which they represented them faithfully.  For instance, Mitt Romney, who supports the Pell Grant-slashing budget of his dead-eyed granny killer running mate, said he supported Pell Grants just as soon as the debate began.

While that kind of lying and getting away with it disturbs me plenty, I'd like to take things from an angle that is sorely lacking in the mainstream media and the blogosphere.  On a couple of very important issues for this country, both candidates appeared to support policies that are extremely destructive, and cowardly in their deference to special interests.  I am referring to gun control and energy.

On the latter issue, Romney bizarrely tried to force Obama into a "yes or no" question on whether his administration has reduced the number of oil leases on federal lands.  While the president did a good job of defending himself, he did not once mention the Deepwater Horizon disaster, or the need to protect our nation's common land from environmental devastation.  On the subject of coal, Romney proclaimed his love of that Dickensian throwback.  Obama's did not dare discuss the negative environmental effects of coal, instead he just pointed out that Romney had flip-flopped from his position when he ran for governor of Massachusetts.  We have now apparently reached a point in our national politics where supporting environmental protection is a non-starter for presidential candidates.  This at a time when global climate change threatens the well-being of billions of people around the world.  I think it's clear we can never expect any real action on that coming catastrophe from our political class.

The same goes for gun control.  After a summer of several harrowing mass shootings at the hands of psychopaths and white supremacist terrorists, the president still would not advocate for additional gun control laws.  He turned the question into a discussion of education, while Romney did him one better and spoke about the need for two-parent households.  Thousands of people die needlessly in this country every year because of our gun laws, but no one who wishes to occupy the top office in the land can even acknowledge that fact.

So yes, we did learn that the president has his fight back, and we saw him defeat Romney in an impressive fashion.  (My wife and I jumped up and hugged each other with joy when it was over.)  We saw yet more evidence of Romney's arrogant douchebaggery and lack of empathy with people who aren't wealthy white men.  However, we also witnessed how our current political system, governed by money and special interests, is completely paralyzed when it comes to dealing with crucial life or death issues.  Perhaps we as a nation ought to talk about that for once.