“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.”
~Alan Cohen
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checking to see how this works
The media is frequently peppered with offhand references to the illegitimacy of global warming due to a cold snap or late season snow, something of a weather phenomena that the US has been experiencing lately. And often, in polarized political circles, headlines do more to shape public opinion than they do to inform. Case in point, here is today’s Drudge Report lead for the National Step It Up Rallies occurring across the nation today: "Snow won't dampen global-warming rallies..." (see http://www.mlive.com/news/grpress/index.ssf?/base/news-35/1176475579151600.xml&coll=6). Here, this news outpost has selected an article from a region of the US where late season snow is common, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Additionally, the very content of the article itself contradicts the messaging embedded into the headline. Take a look.
Generalized, momentary snapshots of a given political climate can change overnight, often with long lasting implications, but the science and conditions that are forcing climate change on this planet have been in the works since the beginning of the industrial revolution. A few cool days and some sleet aren’t going to change much in the overall scheme of things, but ours is a media of hyperbole; emergency scrolling tickers roll across the bottom of the TV screen to constantly remind you that too much sugar in your diet will give you diabetes. And, perhaps as a nation, we’ve become conditioned – sedated – in our attempts to educate ourselves on topics that matter most. Who’s got the time to understand all of the complexities, the fringe mathematical forecasting involved in looking at 200 year trends in weather patterns? When was the last time you sat down and decided to circumnavigate the means by which common insecticides, aka organochlorines (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organochloride), are threatening the health of people and mammals living within the artic circle? (Help yourself, this is easy toilet reading…enjoy: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pagerender.fcgi?artid=1637954&pageindex=1). It might sound like a stretch, but this singular issue – one among thousands – is the chronic result of decades and decades of inaction and neglect. We’ve been lulled to sleep by the pretty flowers of petrochemical company logos while they’ve been steadily unleashing a campaign of terror and destruction upon the organisms of this beautiful world.
Mankind has taken much from the earth, and done little to repay this debt, all the while we’re blinded to the reality of the poisons we’ve been belching into the atmosphere by focusing solely on profits and skyrocketing sales forecasts.
Some contend that the need for action is so immediate, so dire, that to hesitate now is to consider the future bleak, if not very different from in which exists today. With all of the banter about how our grandchildren will look back and wonder about us, and all of the many calls to action that are grounded in the need to make our future more sustainable, I’m finding myself reflecting 100 years back today…and wondering what the hell our grandparents were thinking. Wondering why the people that we trusted to do the right thing have failed us so drastically. So far, all I can come up with is that ours is a world of learned greed and learned hoarding. We’ve been conditioned from very young ages to do away with charity, with generosity, with care. Take 10 minutes on a Saturday morning and look at the cartoons that are being broadcast today. Soldiers transform into bigger, more ably armed soldiers. Shock and awe has superseded concern for humanity, for the world at large.
Today we find ourselves in a position that was once likened to a hard place and a rock. I find a modern analogy more fitting: “like being stuck in a locked garage with the car running, and no doorway out. No windows. And for some reason, we’re not turning off the car.” It’s time to turn off the car, for God’s sake, and get some fresh air in this place. It’s that simple.
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