As the World Melts

We’re not ready for this.

Collectively. As a species.

We’re not ready for what’s coming. We’re not going to be ready until it’s too late, except it already is, it’s already happening, we’re doing nothing about it, and by the time we do something, we should have done it ten years ago, or forty, back when we could have done something about it, back when we first knew about it.

Only we first knew about it sixty years ago. Or seventy, ten years from now.

The world is melting. And we’re just going to let it. We can’t help ourselves.

That’s our take from the UK vote, just how fucked we are, how fucked we’ve been, how fucked we’re going to remain. What it “means” is irrelevant. What’s going to happen is chaos.

Brexit happens. Because Brexit happens, Scotland and Northern Ireland are strongly inclined to disunite their role in the kingdom, and rejoin Europe. Boris has the run of the joint for five years, and it takes at least another five to untangle what he does, if ever.

And then it’s 2030, and the world is still melting, as it has been.

Back in America, maybe Trump “wins” next November — meaning, the Electoral College has now thwarted the consent of the governed twice in a row — or maybe he doesn’t, but we still have the Senate, where half the votes represent 18 percent of citizens, and the Supreme Court, gamed with lifetime appointments by minority presidents, and a judiciary with lifetime appointments filled by documented incompetents.

Nothing gets done. We’ve got our hands full dealing with the destruction — again — that Republicans left in their wake. There’s no “political will” to do anything significant like ameliorating the degree of melting the world is enduring, because the “reality” of the situation doesn’t allow it. We’re destroying our habitat, committing collective suicide, but the survival of our species is a partisan issue, and getting angry at our willful self-destruction isn’t civil.

And then it’s 2030, and the world is still melting, as it has been.

There are opportunities in the world melting, we’re told. New shipping lanes are opening up in formerly frozen seas. Whatever happens, somebody’s gonna come out on top. Coastal cities are drowning under rising oceans, populations are migrating to escape newly uninhabitable lands, but it’s really a new gold rush if you look at it right, and somebody’s gonna win selling the shovels.

We’re not ready for this. We’re not ready for any of this. We’re not ready to deal with a self-inflicted extinction-level event.

It’s not like nukes. The solution to nukes was don’t do nukes. Nukes carried the potential of destroying our planet like the meteor that took out the dinosaurs, but only if we dropped them. So, y’know, don’t drop them.

We’ve known about global warming thirty years — SNL did a parody in 1990. We’ve suspected global warming for sixty years — CBS broadcast a prime-time segment about it in 1958. We’ve had plenty of time to address it, collectively, as a species, but that’s not who we are. We devour resources until they’re gone — look at forests over the centuries — and then we devour what remains — look at fossil fuels over the past 150 years. We devour until nothing remains to devour, and then we disappear. That’s just Nature’s Way.

So yeah, Boris won, and What That Means for the UK, and What That Means for America, yadda yadda yadda, but we’ll be fine, The Arc of the Moral Universe Bends Toward Justice, but that’s a long arc, and while it bends the world melts, and in ten years it still has a century to go, but in a century we won’t be in any condition to notice.

We’re not ready for this.

It would help if we took to heart another MLK line — The Fierce Urgency of Now — and maybe we will, in another ten years. Maybe something will happen where we’re left with no choice but to drop what we’re doing and deal with it, where all political commentary is framed by “How does this stop the world from melting so quickly?”, but that’s not what we’re doing now, and that’s not what we’re gonna do for awhile. We’re just gonna let a simulacrum of the good times roll, right up until Black Friday comes again in 2029, because that’s who we are. That’s who we’ve always been. Stupid monkeys who know too much, and not enough.

Which reminds us of yet another line, one MLK didn’t say: In the long run, we’re all dead.