It seems to me a lot of people have no clue that something global, epochal, without precedent in hominid experience is unfolding before us, because they don’t want to know. It’s too big and overwhelming, too damned depressing to consider, so it drops off the screen.
It’s a reasonable human survival reflex. We all have but one life to live and but one death to die, then we have eternal peace, eternal sleep, or darkness if you gotta believe like that.
Humans are born premature, which allows their pliable forming brains/minds to adapt to real time living conditions. It’s one of the keys to humans surviving and spreading throughout the globe and conquering every land mass, save for the frozen uninhabitable* South Pole.
Our conditioned thinking is set to focus on rear view mirror. Assuming that so long as we keep practicing normal all’s okay. That is until it’s time for your region to get ravaged by our increasingly more intense storms, droughts and heat domes.
Meaning that the mental dissonance between good ol times and the current drum beat of global catastrophes must be getting monstrous. Depression and extremes that can lead to appears growing.
We were fed too much hope and Hollywood thinking - now your house and neighbor is suddenly laid before you like the county dump. How do we as a society and individuals deal with that, bomb the Chinese because of their global warming?
I’m fortified and inoculated by over a half century of proactively paying attention and doing the homework to understand our global climate system and long term dynamics about as well as a layperson can.
I’ve had my periods emotional tsunamis for the past decade and more, as the unstoppableness of this self-inflicted horror would drive itself home. I’m expecting nothing but the worst and the news has been accommodating me, way the fuk too much.
But, I’ve also been learning that there’s always the morning after, survivors get on with getting on, and the new kids that seem to keep getting born didn’t know the good times, so they got that going for themselves as they grow and their bodies and minds learn to navigate the world they were born into.
The dead are dead and safe, and it’s we ourselves we grieve for, as we get on with doing the best we can with what we happen to have.
I believe that spirit of survival can only inhabit those who appreciate Earth and science and have an awareness of coming horror.
and I’ve run out of steam,
with Maddy blessedly trying to stare me into taking her for another walk.
Okay, only a short one {Mishka being gone has left a big hole around here, and I can tell it’s impacted her. Ya know, after initial territory settling, they been closest buds for seven years. She was there as we removed him from the home and cleaned up, then later when his owner buried him, she showed up and watched. We’ve only been by there once, but Maddy spent a lot of time over the buried body sniffing away.
Also, this one I gotta share - A couple days after the death, Maddy and I were on our walk, this direction includes a U-turn at the bottom of our drive onto the drive connecting to a couple homes further down the ridge. Sometime the bottom of the hill is as far as we get, a pee and we head back home, usually though we turn down the other road and a dozen different choices.
So we get to the bottom, I’m busy texting, seems like Maddy don’t want to go further so I’m meandering back up our drive a ways before checking to see if she’s with me. Nope, (we are known to negation on where to go next.} so I turn about, and dang if she’s not in the middle of main drive laid out playing dead with open eyes glued on me.
She had never ever pulled that sort of stunt on me,
I mean we’ve always done stand-up face to face negotiating, never this. I mean splayed out exactly the way Mishka was, when Maddy first walked in that morning and then backed away after getting no closer than 3" from Mishka’s nose.
It was a trip that had me laughing with a ting of sadness, ‘Well, alrightie Maddy, down the road it is, let’s go.’
I’m also more aware than ever that if Maddy dies before me, it’s going to be tough, considering the camaraderie and communication we’ve developed.
*{Today’s human presence in Antarctica is akin to astronauts visiting alien lands. We can visit, but all life support must be imported from habitable Earth, and no human can actually be born there or grow up there, or prosper there. For all intents it’s a frozen alien landscape.]