Posted by
AudiR10TDI on Thursday, January 18, 2007 10:03:40 PM
January 18, 2007 -- Well, winter has come after all, and all the people here in the Greater Toronto area of Kanukistan who were bawling about Global Warming a couple of weekends ago are now crying because they have no boots and no snow tires. People here seem to be stunned anew every winter to find that they don't after all live in Jamaica. It's almost comical to hear the "Storm Trackers" run around waving their arms and secretly hoping that some big storm will allow them to stand out in the snow like Peary at the Pole (or Anderson Cooper in a hurricane).
One of the few advantages of having more of your life behind you than ahead of you is the number of times you've heard what my kids call "We'reAllGonnaDie" rhetoric -- whatever impending disaster is hovering over our heads this week, month or century. Be it giant meteorites exploding above the ground, solar storms, melting ice caps, creeping glaciers, starvation, the death of all birds, a massive population explosion that will destroy the quality of life or some pandemic or other, it seems that since the middle of the 1980s it's all been about Doom. Watching the Dakar (formerly the Paris-Dakar and still called that by some of us) this week and marvelling at the strength and resiliency of the human spirit -- watching women not much younger than I am set across the desert of Mauritania on a motorcycle with nothing in the way of support save the box of tricks on board the chase plane, and men that are older than I am (or even men with only one leg) crawling through the desert in dust-covered, dented cars with only their wits and a prayer between them and death, I can't believe there will ever be anything that happens to us that we can't get on top of and solve.
By we, of course, I don't mean Kanukistanians, who will be on the phone demanding that their MPP "do something" as the plane crashes into their office and carries away their files.
This year's End of the World is called "Global Warming." This is something made up by PR people somewhere using the same science that once predicted New York City would be hip deep in horse poo by 1955 if the population kept growing as it was -- and that buildings could never be taller than 5 stories because no one would ever walk up any higher. (Yes, I once stood at the top of the Twin Towers and I have to say 102 floors was way too high for me; however, I work on the 45th floor and run up and down the elevators all day from 41 to 51 and never think about how high up I am.) What nobody in today's television culture can't seem to grasp is that the only thing these extrapolations can do is extend the present into the imaginary future and tell us what life will be like if what's happening today keeps happening tomorrow. As anyone who has been working in an office lately and seen six different revamps in software and storage media that last only long enough for you to transfer everything from the one you can't use anymore to the one you won't be able to use tomorrow, this is a foolish fancy. Paul Ehrlich predicted that we'd have mass starvation by 1985 because he thought people would continue having babies at the rate the Baby Boomer's parents had them . It was easier just to do math than to think to himself why they had all those children and to see that those children were bound and determined to remain children, especially when some obliging person invented reliable birth control. Suddenly women were freed of the inevitability of pregnancy and many of them decided to 'time shift' as we say today and go backpacking through Europe, get a college education, go into the work force and exploit their new found freedom to marry and divorce as easily as they changed their sandals. This of course led to entirely different family configurations and all put together led people to have few or not children unless they had no choice (i.e. in countries where most of the children die of disease, which never seems to change.)
Not only that, but people are spreading out and mixing in ways nobody ever seems to have guessed would happen. Robert Heinlein said that this was the unforeseen consequence of the family automobile -- the ability of people to search for spouses and living quarters and jobs many miles from home, and to see that the world is a much bigger and more diverse and fascinating place than it was for their own parents (save the fathers that went to war). America is a wealthy country by any standard of measurement (even those who whine about their poverty live better than most of the people hanging onto some kind of bourgeoise respectability in Canada) and when people don't have to slave for food, clothing, shelter and education, they spend more of their time trying to manufacture something to do. One of the things they seem to fix on with alarming regularity is, well, alarm. Nothing seems to make the First World happier than to run in circles waving its collective arms and screaming "We'reAllGonnaDie!" Shrewd PR people exploit this and sell the latest scare as long as people will fall for it. Global warming is just the latest.
Anyone who has done much reading, including my Daddy who is the worlds most enthusiastic conspiracy nut, can trace the patterns of sunspots and solar flares that have alternated with the times of blistering cold when it snows on the Fourth of July. Men and Women like to believe that they are not only responsible for everything that goes on, but like the rooster that crows as the sun comes up, they think they can actually do something that will cause it to change. Once I had the privilege of seeing a total eclipse of the Sun. I was standing in a park in Atlanta in 1982, quietly excited but sure of what I was going to see (having studied eclipses and read about them and seen film in the planetarium) ... and amusing myself watching graying women in granny dresses and ponytail hippies with bald tonsures atop, readying their crystals to capture the mysterious energy they were sure would be released when the sun had gone from view. But the people that held my interest were not these silly relics, but rather the "Yuppies" from the downtown office buildings who stood, mouths agape and eyes wide as the park dimmed and the confused birds began to seek their roosts...and as the park lights, triggered by electric eyes, sprang to life. (I have photos of this). Warned by those who know, nobody was staring at the vanishing Sun, but instead were watching the sky darken and the disc darken in a pool of water nearby. When totality was reached, there was applause. For what? For the Author in whom most of them professed not to believe?
Then as the shadow moved on and the disc began to emerge again, the crowd let out a disappointed moan. "Does it have to be over so soon?" someone complained. Tactfully nobody laughed. I, and I'm sure many others, stood there watching this and experiencing it and taking from it the sure knowledge of how very little we human beings control in the long run -- how very little we understand and how helpless we are against the majesty of the universe in which we float on a dust speck on the edge of an insignificant galaxy in an obscure corner of a universe beyond anything we will ever understand.
In the light of this I can't possibly take seriously all the screaming and arm waving that attempts to have some effect on the world we live in that has been moving through these cycles since long before any human was here to see. The atmosphere in which we live and move today is the third one the Earth has had -- and it was toxic to the life that came before us. Bet you don't waste much time worrying about them, do you?
And even when Paul Ehrlich was yelling about the coming population explosion, while I was at University, I remember reading that if all the people alive in the whold of the world in 1966 were placed in Australia, the density of the population would be less than that currently experienced in Japan. And the Japanese are not starving to death nor are they suffocating with no space to breathe. Only 5% of America is tenanted. If it gets too hot, too wet, too bored -- we will move.
Daddy used to say that if we were told one day that a year from today the world would be under 9 feet of water, the main body of humanity would start looking for someone to blame; the Christians would start praying for a miracle -- and the Jews would start learning how to live under water. I'd like to think that the same group of people currently streaking for Dakar, Senegal would be looking for an answer too. At the very least, they'd be building boats.
So as far as Global Hooey is involved, I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it. The only thing I'm interested in is what kind of terrifying Hideous Death they will cook up to scare us with tomorrow.