To Avert Disaster

Climate change and its dangers ...

Scientists are warning us, raising a cry that we're reaching some kind of a tipping point, a point of no return, or something like that.

Perhaps their warnings are overstated; but to pay them no heed is just plain foolhardy.

GOP leaders, convinced in their shallow world that science is hokum and history is bunk, because they're drunk on power and cannot conceive of a world beyond their mighty control!

Buttressed by the idiocy of the evangelicals, claiming that gawd would never allow such a thing, because human beings are on top of the heap, commissioned by gawd to dominate the world, to wrest from it all that we can for our pleasure.

Fill the air with dirt, the water with poison, the soil with chemicals, and kill the big animals for the pleasure of mounting a head or two, or three, or hundreds and thousands on the walls of their luxury. Don't worry, gawd will clean it all up for us ... or at the least, rapture off to happy-land those who believe.

Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, were all warned by their more seasoned generals, but full steam ahead into disaster was their way, because power deludes those who have it.

No matter what, the earth will survive our foolish and arrogant behavior, but how much better it would be for us to think our way through the times, to rely upon reason and science, to consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, rather than blunder our way into disaster.

The scientists warning us are not a bunch of panicked Chicken Littles, but women and men of wisdom who are likely and mostly right.

Biblically speaking, there is nothing in the text to warrant undo confidence in God's protective providence. The storm is coming said the prophets, and it came with God's own fury for a people who deafened themselves to the prophet's cry and hardened their hearts against the poor (these two dynamics seem to run hand-in-hand).

I hope, I pray, that our next group of leaders will have a greater sense of reason, a deeper respect for science, and a heart for the poor.

To avert disaster: to remember the polar bear and to care for the children who weep at night