No Matter Where You Turn, You Run Face First Into Walls. What Would a Progressive Do?

 

Maybe you doubt that Canada is in the throes of a climate emergency. Then you're an idiot.

Maybe you cling to blind hope that "they'll think of something." Then you're an idiot.

Maybe you figure if you were just more careful with your recycling a lot of this would go away. Yep, you're an idiot.

Maybe you want to believe that Mr. Trudeau will sort it all out and keep us snug and safe. Definitely an idiot.

Maybe you just don't want to think about it. Then you're a coward.

If one or more of these exist in your life, don't even call yourself progressive. Cowardice is not progressive. Idiocy is not progressive.

The CBC has a story this morning about how the Fraser Valley flooding is a warning to us all. A warning? What about all the warnings we've had and ignored for the past two, three decades? Didn't Canada get the memo that climate breakdown would bring severe storm events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration? Why were we left out?  Weren't we told to expect extreme heat waves? Haven't we noticed our steadily worsening wildfires, year by year by year; or our receding glaciers; or our disappearing Arctic sea ice; or that damn "Blob" thing a couple of hundred miles off our coast out in the Pacific; or the droughts that now plague grain farmers and ranchers on the prairies; or the infestation of pine beetles wiping out vast swathes of our once verdant forests? What did we think that was all about?

What is this, Rip Van Winkle for the 21st century?

Yes, we need a major overhaul of our essential infrastructure. When, in just one day, all four of your highways and both of your major railways go down, you got a problem, an infrastructure problem, and you've been ignoring it for years, decades.

Yes, we have fallen victim to feeble infrastructure but the real culprit has been decades of neglect and dereliction by our political caste, Conservative, Liberal and New Dem alike. They've been kicking this can down the road, one after the other. They have chosen not to protect us, to leave us vulnerable to that day when nature would come calling. 

They've done a fine job protecting, even nurturing, our fossil fuel companies, just not us. The thousands of orphaned oil wells across the West that now become the public's problem testify to the outright betrayal by those we foolishly elected to high office. Ditto for those massive tailing ponds in the Athabasca Tar Sands. Wait till we get the bill for that - unless storms like those that just hit the Fraser Valley get to those lethal ponds first. 

Now we have to deal with the consequences of their neglect, getting caught unprepared by climate breakdown. But, if we're to have a chance, we have to get ourselves out from under the rot that we keep electing to rule us. They're working for somebody but it ain't you.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Up in Smoke. 300 Sq. Mi. of Amazon Rainforest Lost Every Day.

Image
  The Amazon rainforest is disappearing at what should be an alarming rate. 312 sq. mi. or 808 sq. kms. every day. Over the past 30 years humans have destroyed a patch of the Amazon equal in area to the states of Texas and New Mexico . The Amazon – historically a great carbon absorber, since trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen – now releases more carbon than it stores, which adds to, rather helps to reduce, our global climate crisis. Deforestation rates decreased slightly from 2004 to 2012. But since then, they’re back on the rise, especially in the past couple of years, since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil. In 2018, as Bolsonaro campaigned as a patriotic man of the people, scientists predicted that once the Amazon lost more than 25% of its tree cover, it would become a drier ecosystem, all because deforestation changes weather patterns (due to how trees respire), which in turn reduces rainfall. Furthermore, as the forest becomes fragmented, areas surrounded...
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr...
Read more

Who Asks "Why?"

Every time there's a conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, all we hear is 'why?'  Why, as in, whose fault is this? It's easier to affix blame if you can truncate the event. Pick a convenient start date, something recent. In this case we'll make it either the Israeli eviction of Arabs from Jerusalem or the scuffle that took place outside the mosque in response. If those don't work, let's go for Hamas launching unguided rockets into Israel. That's even better because it tags Hamas with the blame. The nice thing about this approach is you can just keep using it. It goes on and on, just as it has for the past half-century since the '67 war. You can even date this whole mess to the beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Israelis are said to have called these periodic wars, "mowing the lawn." The idea is that, every now and then, you have to take these Arabs to the woodshed. And then you keep your powder dry unt...
Read more