The old galoot’s just gotta stop looking at what passes for news these days.
What a freaking avalanche of ****.
Flock cameras, data centers, gold statues, manufactured history, AI, gas prices, pulling immigrants from their cars and homes, destruction and defiling of national monuments and parks, sailors jumping off aircraft carriers charged with malingering(?!), verbal (so far) attacks on that evil maple leaf-shrouded colossus to our north, almost makes us overlook the freight train coming down the tracks at us.
Yep, that would be climate change.
Boo!!
Scientists have been warning us about it since the codger was in short pants. That’s been awhile. We seemed to pay attention for awhile there, but between politicians and their shiny objects, folks tryin’ to sell us ever bigger mansions, RVs, and “tanks” to get our groceries, if we’re not wearing “rose-colored glasses,” they’re beer goggles.
Now the old guy’s gonna pause for a second while those of us who really believe in not only Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, but Elvis, JFK, RFK and maybe Dolly getting together for a cut throat poker game somewhere in Arkansas right now, can just squeeze those peepers tight and step away from that highly flammable newsprint in front of you.
Ready? They didn’t just “pave Paradise”, they, we literally burnt it to a crisp in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and figuratively in the paradise of Maui, Hawaii, as palm trees popped and sizzled in a furnace of endless destruction.
One after the other they run together in a nightmare reel through our minds; deluges of water down beautiful winding streams taking summer campers in the Hill country of Texas, hundreds of homeowners in the unfathomable torrents of the picturesque mountains of North Carolina and just a few miles south in north Reynolds County.
And all, with a lingering, ominous backdrop of heat, drought, wilting vegetation, dropping aquifers and dying hundred-year-old trees.
Glacier National Park with no discernible glaciers, the magnificent Grand Tetons with disappearing snow caps. Hundreds of human dead in the stifling furnace of heat which is Europe this summer while determined tourists pretend to be oblivious as they send back pictures of parched venues from their air-conditioned hotel rooms.
An unending torching of our wild lands and increasingly our rural communities and even suburbs as more and more of our irreplaceable environment literally goes up in smoke.
There are factually more and larger wildfires everywhere on this earth than ever before in historic times. We’ve reached a point where their heat is affecting our weather patterns.
But, amidst it all, a single video keeps running through the old geezer’s mind since he first saw it. He was raised during the disaster flick craze where pretty much every iconic object, structure, etc. screenwriters could imagine was inundated, shaken to pieces, or otherwise demolished by some type of almost inconceivably apocalyptic natural or unnatural catastrophe.
Admittedly, our ability to create special effects back then wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as today, but that didn’t keep us from trying to top each other in jaw dropping carnage.
But, looking back on that myriad of cinematically imagined and created havoc over tens of years, the old guy’s never seen anything from even the most fevered mind and imagination to approach the brief video in question.
You may have seen it, what can only be a thousand-foot-high wall of water, ice and mud rolling in only seconds over huge multiple story structures, buses and helplessly fleeing human beings as miniscule and hopeless as ants.
It. Will. Not. Leave. Me.
A giant glacier in the Himalayas which had accumulated over literally thousands of years collapsed in moments in the ever-growing heat and brought us a crystal-clear message, a message received too late for those thousands of helplessly fleeing souls in their last moments of life.
Pretending climate change doesn’t exist no longer works.
