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Starbucks is, unsurprisingly, the only thing open in this storm, commerce’s cockroach.
Neilus Smiley liked this
She doesn’t bother correcting him. One hundred percent of legitimate climate scientists believe the world to be on the verge of irreversible collapse, but yes, a small percentage remain unconvinced
Among climate scientists, especially those who have spent years in the field, they jokingly refer to it as “pretraumatic stress disorder,” but the feelings themselves are no joke: anger, hopelessness, depression, panic—a recurring nightmare in which you see the tsunami on the horizon but can’t convince anyone to leave the beach. She knows scientists who have become drunks, who have dropped out and moved to the desert, who have committed suicide. Does she sometimes ask herself, Why go on? No. She asks that question every day.
An ignorant orange grifter was elected president and turned science denial into official government position.
Harvey Milk’s iconic speech about hope (“You cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living.”).
Marvin Gaye + Do Not Disturb = middle-aged people having sex.
Weather is climate in a certain time and place.
And most of all, they shared this sense of screw-it frustration about their fellow Americans’ blithe reaction, in the face of overwhelming evidence (some of which they have personally gathered), to impending environmental doom. “Honestly, after a while, you feel like saying, ‘I surrender. It’s not worth it,’” Dr. Molson says. “So to have Rowan say, ‘Screw it, let’s get drunk’ . . . well . . .” She laughs and doesn’t finish the thought. “Oh, I get that,” Dr. Poole says. “You bang your head against a wall screaming, ‘We’ve got to do something,’ and what does your country do? Vote in a bunch of
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Is it any wonder we are pulled so quickly from our sense of doom, from sorrow and desperation, in such a world as this? Who could believe that in such overwhelming beauty exists such fragility?
she pictures students protesting the now-weekly school shootings with their perfectly reasonable request to apply some basic common sense and rational thought, to do something—to enact some basic gun laws—and how demoralizing it must be to see those same adults shrug helplessly at the backward, illogical politics, to act as if nothing can be done when clearly everything can be done.
Clearly, EVERYTHING can be done…if we can somehow summon the will and convince the unwilling.
God, she realizes, we haven’t done anything. We bitch at conferences or we write papers, or we make antigun placards or we march on a specified day, or we put on a pussy hat or we protest for an hour, but then we go back to work, back to watching TV, back to lives of petty gossip and distraction.
