It’s the End of the World As We Know It, Bye, Bye
By the way, life is good
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Ok, that title is a teaser but there is a lot going on across our little planet. It’s easy to get absorbed by the short term craziness of guys like Putin and Trump, but there are way bigger issues if we pull back and think about it. Those guys will both be gone pretty soon but their wakes will still be around.
But there is an issue we seem to be pretending is sort of normal.
I’m talking about weather. Last night I learned that 50% of the rivers on the planet are dried up part of the year. 50%. And a former hurricane once named Fiona, a subtropical cyclone with 100 mile an hour winds hit the Atlantic provinces of Canada, sucking houses out into the ocean and flooding cities and towns unprepared for anything like that.
Meanwhile Florida is about to get stomped by a Category Four hurricane named Ian, a nice British name (like Fiona) for an unimaginably destructive force of nature. If I lived there, I’d be in the car I don’t actually own and heading for the hills.
Etc., etc.
Why aren’t insanely destructive storms named with more alarming names, things like Wolverine or Destructor? Just a thought.
Meanwhile, those of us fortunate enough to live in relative comfort spend our free time watching fantasies like Rings of Power or Andor and pretending everything is something called ‘normal’.
We might see a country deploy a nuclear weapon against a neighboring country this week. And the US, according to Secretary of State Blinken, has a plan to respond to that. I have a pretty good imagination but I can’t conceive of a response that is not the beginning of the end.
Maybe if we nuked Putin himself. Otherwise he would probably up the ante on anything we would do, escalation.
Is it the end of the world as we know it? I don’t think so but I live a life of privilege in a place relatively immune, for the time being, to the bad weather. But Nova Scotians probably thought the same thing.
As an observer of these events, via the news media and the Internet, it would be easy to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the things I’ve mentioned here. It is creating a kind of…
