In the Cryptofont Zoo of bizarre and exotic creatures of word, I, as a wordsmith, have become quite a keeper. My lovely Zoo is the rival of any in the world… er, U.S… er, well, it’s different. Let me give you a tour and see what you think.
First on our tour are the strange and wonderful animals in the Popeye-isms section. You know, the bizarre creatures of word first spawned by E.C. Segar in his strip known as Thimble Theater, better known by the later name of Popeye the Sailor. I regularly use many of these little animals in my writing, making the spell checker hate me and making the readers pause with a private “isn’t this wrong?” sort of thing. I am often disgustipated with the words and I should have antiskipated the whole spell-checker thing. If you just keep hitting the add to the dictionamary button, soon the whole thing is discomboobulated and ready to just give me the ol’ twisker punch! It takes an ol’ salt like Poopdeck Pappy and a whole can of Spinach to sort this sichymawation out.
Thimble Theater by E. C. Segar
Now next on our tour, fear this thing over here, this Seussian Sphere, where we keep the rhyme animals more. I use these critters too, in place of bad glue, and to gloss over all that’s a bore.
There are also the Thingamadoodles like oodles of poodles that come from the Forest of Seussian Lore. I never will know why the Whangdoodles tootle and spurt the bright snootles while they snore. The thing that’s head-achy and a little mind-breaky about the Doctor’s good chore, is the way it is rhyming and syllable-climbing while you write it right out through the door!
Once I bounce just an ounce of the rhyming nonsense out of my head, I can tell you about word munchers and other evil critters. One evil word muncher got the word “thing” in the previous sentence and made it come out “thong” until I caught the spelling error; (My spell checker still has not forgiven me my Popeye-isms, so I have to check it myself). It is rare that a word muncher is ever useful. I collect many of them in my writing on a daily basis, but mostly they just take up space (like the “mostyl” I just captured in this sentence!). Oh, yes, the most common variety of word muncher seems to me to be the “dna” or “adn” or “nad” that always blossoms its evil petals out where ever I need a conjunction.
The family dog (not dgo) from the other day… but in full color ( not cloor)
Bedevils are evil stray thoughts that pepper everything you write with distractions. Bedevils, by their very nature, and I assure you they are natural, will… what was that I was talking about? Oh, they have evil in their very name. Emerson said that a “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”, but I think that Bedevils are more like a real hobgoblin that plagues the minds of those whose heads are too full, and not of straw, like in this Wizard-of-Oz allusion.
Okay, I have taken you as far through this little word zoo as my mind can handle. If you really read it and now are plagued with nightmares about it, I apologize for what I just did to your own writing. You will never be free of these wee beasties again, will you?
The world is on fire. The heat is getting worse than it has ever been (in the time we limited sentient creatures have knowledge of.) There is a very real chance that the end of life on Earth is actually a short time away in the near future (a thing some religions have been predicting unsuccessfully for thousands of years.) What will it actually mean for us to be at the end of time (realizing that we are only talking about our pale blue dot in the near-endless universe?)
Here’s what we face. The greenhouse gasses, particularly carbon dioxide, are keeping the heat from the sun from radiating back out into space. Temperatures have already passed what a few years ago was described as the point of no return. The permafrost in the northern hemisphere is melting, releasing increasing amounts of methane, an even worse greenhouse gas, and creating a feedback loop that makes the problem overwhelming. The glaciers in the north and the ice shelf in Antarctica are melting, and sea levels are rising. Major coastal cities are not preparing fast enough for being underwater. Huge populations will be displaced and become refugees. Food-production systems will break down due to drought and unrest amongst workers in both farming and the distribution of food. The mounting expenses of battling these unbearable problems will destroy economies. More wars will break out to add to the misery Putin has already caused by war crimes in Ukraine. Eventually, nuclear weapons may cool the Earth with nuclear winter and stop the production of carbon dioxide by obliterating all manufacturing and depopulating the northern hemisphere. The cockroaches will inherit the Earth. Hopefully, as the dominant species, they will do a better job of managing the environment. But one never knows how they will handle it once they reach their own industrial revolution.
The probable next dictator of the American Fascist Union of Republican States.
Politically, the party with the power denies the existence of the climate crisis. They are concerned with expunging any record of white-people guilt for any crimes against racial groups caused by slavery, Jim Crow laws, genocide against Native Americans, lynching, and any of the other fruits of racism from the history books. They are, after all, quite comfortable in all-white conservative bubbles of thought, and are easily offended by any defense of the Black Lives Matter group. They also focus on removing any suggestion of sexual ideas or knowledge from school books and libraries, because anything but Bible-touted notions of love and sex is pornographic, perverted, or somehow related to lifestyles they certainly don’t want to have anything to do with and prefer to legislate away. So, every effort they are willing to make to avoid the things in that previous killer paragraph involves loudly saying “No!” to any possible solutions to the problems that are going to kill us. Hopefully, the cockroaches won’t become Trumpist Republicans when they take over, giving their rise to intelligence and civilization a better chance of thriving.
It is probably still within our power to stop this relentless life-extinguishing future from happening. There are definitely people who understand both the scientific challenges and the value of all the things we will lose if we sacrifice the entirety of our future for short-term corporate profits (the things all the Republicans we will continue to elect will vote for because of where their priorities really lie.) The human population has shown repeatedly throughout history that they are resilient and inventive, and can overcome all sorts of evil if the will to do so is truly there.
I am a pessimist, which means I always prepare for the worst possible outcome. Fortunately, that way of thinking means I am usually pleasantly surprised at the outcome, and if it does turn out bad, at least I am prepared for that outcome.
So, if we are going to destroy our world and ourselves, I have to ask myself, was it worth it for us to have ever existed?
Can you look at the smiling face of a child and say the existence of the human race on planet Earth was not worth the effort?
And there are reasons to be glad we are here and we have a history that came before us. The Civil War and World War Two were both terrible things. But one eliminated legal slavery. The other eliminated fascist genocidal regimes from Europe and Japan.
We are able, as a species, to laugh at our own foibles, to create humor and music and literature and poetry. We were able to produce Shakespeare, Mozart, Rober Frost, Red Skelton, Robin Williams, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, Beethoven, Kurt Vonnegut, the Beatles, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Elvis, Goethe, Socrates, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, T. S. Eliot, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Julie Andrews, Johnny Carson, and the list could go on for days…
We were able to rise up from the ground, fly through the air, and eventually land on the Moon.
We were able to survive the Black Death, Small Pox, Ebola Virus, AIDS, and Covid 19.
We unleashed the power of the atom. We observed and learned about the far reaches of the galaxy and the many other galaxies in the greater universe beyond the Milky Way using only telescopes, mathematics, and the scientific method.
Is it enough to justify the existence of our race? You tell me. I foolishly think we are worthy to live on into the future, even if I myself will soon no longer be able to keep living. I hope to die of non-climate-crisis causes with peace in my heart. But I realize, too, that it depends on a lot of other people besides me. And I do not have confidence in all of them.
If there is a God who can help us, He is certainly welcome to make an announcement in the comments. But barring Divine intervention, what are you willing to do to move the question forward? I am doing what is within my power.
After five years of bankruptcy, I have finally started collecting dolls again. These are purchases since my debt was put to rest.
As a writer, I am often asked what kind of audience I think I am writing for. “Who, Mickey, is going to read your silly fantasy stories?”
To be perfectly clear… I started out as a writer intending to be a YA novelist, writing for more mature middle school and high school readers, probably more female than male. But any good YA writer writes stories that appeal to the adult, even if it is only the adult part of teenagers. Books like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Giver, The Hunger Games, and Ender’s Game are well known because of the adult readers who read, love, and praise those stories. I’m not saying you can’t intentionally write for a young adult audience. But I am saying you can’t write down to those readers, or you will certainly offend and lose them before the end of your story. You have to understand that they are becoming adults.
Uh, oh! I forgot that there is also a doll of Wanda, the Scarlet Witch. Now she wants to murder everyone with magic. Is Batman immune since he comes from DC rather than Marvel? Does Marvel Magic work on DC heroes?
But you can’t please all readers. Two readers who left devastating reviews on two of my books basically over-reacted to what I wrote, and let me have it with both barrels of their “Save-the-world-from-icky-Mickey” crusades. One thought Sing Sad Songs was reprehensible and evil because two of the characters, young Valerie, and Francois, the boy from France, experience sexual attraction to each other, and then both have to deal with the emotions it causes by talking about it with friends and families. The reviewer insisted that children should not talk or think about sex in a story. That was a moral violation according to her, even though no actual sex scene occurs in the story beyond a French kiss. The other lady reviewer objected to depictions of the nudist Cobble sisters in The Baby Werewolf. She claimed that the depiction of the girls, particularly Sherry, was entirely too “creepy” even though the book is a horror comedy and built on creepiness in the central conflict. Authors apparently have to have a thick skin, as every kook and prude is entitled to their own opinion.
On the positive side, though, I have gained a lot of readers who are nudists because of the Cobble Sisters and their status as at-home-on-the-farm nudists. Particularly in the companion book of The Baby Werewolf, Recipes for Gingerbread Children. The idea of nudist characters and naked people in a story makes many potential readers turn up their noses, assuming it is something perverted or pruriently sexual. I think, though, that I have successfully depicted nudists as they actually are, having been a part of the Texas nudist community, at least on the fringes. They are definitely not perverts and sex fiends, as the girls are routinely explaining to their non-nudist friends.
But I can basically describe my personal philosophy of writing for a target audience this way;
I write with an imaginary member of my target audience reading over my shoulder. Sometimes they sock me in the back of my head for things I have written. But I am not writing for him or her. I am writing for me, the things I want to write, like to write, have to write, and need to write to live.
It was during that eight-hour period set aside for sleep that Ged awoke in a sweat. Dreams again! He couldn’t quite recall what he’d been dreaming, but it gave him the uneasy feeling that it was about his brother Ham, and that it was one of those dreams a Psion sometimes has that comes true. He was sandwiched in between two small, warm bodies. Junior was snuggled next to him on one side, snoring softly. Sarah was on the other side, her small body sheathed in her white body suit, looking like an angel and radiating angelic energies.
The spaceship, in the form of an Ancient Red Dragon, continued to purr with power as it flew through jump space.
Ged knew sleep was highly unlikely for him now. Still, he didn’t turn on the lights or re-absorb the short brown fur that his Psion power generated every evening now to keep him warm. He looked at the two sleeping children. They had grown a lot while in his care.
Junior reminded him of Ham as much as any blood relative would have. The blue face was totally different from the handsomer half of the Aero Brothers’ Space Safari Service, but the unruly blond hair was similar. And Ged couldn’t help but call to mind the boy’s wistful smile, so like the smile that made his brother Ham so engaging and heroic. With one furry hand, Ged reached over and stroked the boy’s yellow hair. This child was precious to him. So alien, yet now become an indispensable part of Ged’s life as a spacer.
Sarah, on the other side, was probably the most beautiful child he had ever encountered. As he looked at her intently, he couldn’t help but think it was far more than a physical beauty. Her father was one of a handful of so-called Forever Men in the galaxy. He was an immortal, capable of traveling in a straight line through a thousand years. He had gifted his daughter with more than a thousand years worth of human wisdom, culture, and literature. What was more, she was able to draw entire libraries full of learning directly from her father’s head via telepathy. At less than twelve years old, she was more learned than Ged would ever be.
What was he doing on this alien space craft in a bed between these two amazing children? How could he ever hope to be worthy of caring for them and protecting them? Worse, he was now taking them from the relative safety of the planet Gaijin, back into an Imperial Space full of war and violence, cruel pirates, and shambling hordes of rot warriors who were no more than animated skeletons with a computerized control system. Not just these two, either. He had a whole shipload of special children that he was now somehow responsible for. What was he doing here? How could a talented hunter and space traveler from Questor suddenly be a teacher and the only adult guiding these children toward a highly questionable future? The thought made him quiver in spite of the warm fur.
Maybe being a teacher wasn’t so bad, though. He was a natural with loving discipline. Except for Alec Songh, all of these children adored and looked up to him. It felt good to be addressed with respectful honorifics and awe. It seemed he did have something to teach them.
Shu Kwai had become a powerful telekinetic because of Ged’s success in describing for him the workings of the inner eye.
Ged’s own perceptive powers had grown exponentially as he continued to practice changing his own shape. He could transform now not just by taste and touch, but by scent and even by imagination. He could almost become the creatures of his dreams by placing them at the focus of his powerful inner eye.
Friashqazatla was gaining a lot in shape-change power from the instruction Ged gave him. So far, he could only take a humanoid shape with canine features or a small, black wolf with a human brain and voice, but the rest would surely come with time and practice.
Gyro, the other Nebulon boy besides Junior was learning practically everything Ged knew about starship repair and maintenance. He could find and pull the skills directly out of Ged’s memory. He seemed to have a really vast aptitude for anything mechanical or electronic. He was also a god of mathematics and space-travel equations. The need to find an astrogator was quickly becoming irrelevant.
Even the Phoenix and Rocket Rogers were learning from him. They had a power over fire that he did not comprehend at all. It was a Psion power completely un-like his own. Still, they learned to work together from Ged, in the way he had always done so naturally with his brother Ham. He taught the two boys the hunting language of hand signs and gestures that allowed non-telepaths to speak in silence. He taught them tracking skills and the interpreting of signs left by those who pass through a place.
But the question that bothered Ged most was, “What have I become?” He had taken pride in being a moral man, a servant of the true God. Now, he was the lover of two different women, one little more than a child herself. His love had caused them both pain and trouble. And the more he became a Psion and used his power, the more he felt degraded and sick. He had become a monster. And what about his brother Ham?
Still, as he lay there awake and troubled he couldn’t help but turn back to thoughts of Ham. They had escaped from Imperial Space. They had found paradise. Don’t Go Here was a source of potential wealth. He and Ham had liberated the population, revived the starport, and wove them into the great web of space. They owned the starport and had control over who came in.
Gaijin was even better. There he had found acceptance. They didn’t seem to care that he was different and tainted with Psion blood. They seemed to think it was a good thing. He and Ham could have a good life between those two planets. And now, it seemed, both of them were being drawn back into the dangerous realm that was the Imperium. Looming doom seemed to be beckoning to them both. Ged hunkered down again between the two sleeping children. He needed to get some sleep. Thoughts of the other children in his care, Billy Iowa, Jadalaqstbr, Mai Ling, Hassan Parker, Taffy King, and difficult Alec Songh, could be put off for the moment. Still, thinking about the future made his stomach churn and sleep remained a stranger.
In the hold, three decks below in the belly of the Ancient dragon starship, the malevolent Tesserah continued to percolate with sickly green and purple lights. Whatever evil thing the device was supposed to do, it was busy doing it.
Where we now stand, if you are going by the picture, is outside in the Texas sunshine and heat. We should be standing, if we were smart, under the shade of the mushrooms that grew up quickly as a result of so much unseasonable rain. Of course, that would be assuming that Mickey is currently a pixie with dragonfly wings, which he probably is not… at least, not right at this moment. Climate change is turning Texas into a giant pressure-cooker with enough leftover hurricane moisture in it to reach an explosive boil by the end of July.
We are being manipulated now by the crafty, vile servants of the deposed idiot-king, treating the righteously-installed successor as an illegitimate usurper.
We are hearing now the testimony of the castle guards as they detail the failed assault of orcs and other monstrosities as they tried to dethrone the legitimate ruler. And one wonders why there are not more beheadings going on in the currently secure castle courtyard. The villains apparently have gained more rights than they deserve.
Still, in a kingdom beset by many ill omens and partisan Republicans, there are good things happening too in the sunshine.
Mickey’s latest free-book promotion gave away twelve e-book copies of AeroQuest One: Stars and Stones. And I have actually sold for money four e-book copies of other books as well, and an additional 400+ pages read on Kindle Unlimited of three other books.
And my mother, now gone from us for ten months, has left me enough inheritance to be out of my bankruptcy for the first time in five years, and, with my two sisters, be a part owner of the family farm that has been in the family for 150 years.
So, we stand together tentatively now, worried about what tomorrow and the next election may bring. But holding the high ground, a good defensive position.
Yes, the universe was not formed in a big bang. It hatched from an egg. And God is the Ultimate Mallard.
Anatidaephobia (pronounced anna-tidy-phobia) is a pervasive and irrational fear that you are being watched by a duck. A person with this rare phobia fears that somehow, somewhere a duck is watching their every move.
This phobia about being watched by a duck may seem like a strange basis for forming a new religion. But I may have had an epiphany as a child when a goose at Deer Farm Zoo stuck his neck, head, and beak of retribution out through a hole in his chicken-wire cage and nearly nipped me in my five-year-old neck. That epiphany led to recurring nightmares about being chased by a duck with large white teeth that looked like he had bad human dentures in his bill.
This I tended to interpret as a sign that I was facing a big decision about what I would attempt to do with my young life, and would do it wrong.
Ducks in the farmyard, you see, are temperamental, often impulsive, and randomly violent. They will punish you for sins you did not know you were committing.
So, in this Quackatoon faith in judgmental ducks who are constantly watching our every move, thought, and deed, we should be taking Saint Donald Duck as our role-model and guide. When we see sin and wrongness in the world we are watching, we must dissolve in incoherent rage. Point your finger. Shout things that no one understands. Get the world’s attention. Confuse them completely. And get them to wonder what they did to make you so rage-filled and dangerously aggravated.
Then, hopefully, they will realize their sin and immediately mend their ways. Or at least, rearrange their feathers.
Or we can rely on the incompetent vengeful wrath of Saint Daffy Duck to see the unrighteousness in the rabbits of the world around us, posting Rabbit Season signs everywhere, and getting his duckbill blown off via the shotgun of a nearby Elmer who has been tricked into thinking ducks are rabbits.
Well, that might not be the most efficient prosecution of God’s will on Earth. But at least it will leave us laughing. And who can sin who is laughing that hard?
At this point in trying to establish this new religion, I should probably be talking about financial matters. Where you can send donations to the Church of Perpetual Quackers? Will there be t-shirts with religious slogans like, “You’re Driving Me Quackers!?” Do we still bring deviled eggs to church socials?
But I can’t talk about that right now… a duck is probably watching.
So, how do you follow up a thing like starting a new religion like Quackatoonity? Should you follow it up?
I mean, this is Art Day. And I need a theme for Art Day. How about, “Art with no ducks in it?” Well, Ducks are always watching from somewhere. So, I guess that’s a no-go.
Of course, I could always try to prove the “toon” part is real. I am a cartoonist. I do do cartoons. (Haha! He said, “doodoo!” Shows you the level of humor he will sink to.)
This cartoon is a bit creepy and definitely surreal. This was done more than a decade before I even met my wife. But the two boys seem to be four years apart in age, just like my real-life sons. They do not, however, have visible horns on their heads. This is supposed to be surreal, not photographic.
So, there’s a weird cartoon story for today’s Art Day post on a New Day. And nowhere in sight will you find a duck in it… OH, NO! THERE’S A DUCK IN IT!!! How does Donald do that?
You will have to forgive my terrible poetry at the beginning of this post. I can’t help myself sometimes.
But just because someone is a terrible poet, the way Mickey professes to be, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to them. Mickey has considerable experience with the topic of being bitter. After all, he was a teacher for 31 years, 24 of which were spent in middle school monkey houses.
But nothing is ever made better by being bitter. No matter what was done to you, how you were insulted, or what injustices you suffered, it does not make things better to get revenge or even plot revenge. The fire of hot anger burns while it is inside you, but, in truth, you are the only one who really feels the heat, the only one who really gets burnt.
You can’t even solve the bitterness by reasoning with the one who offended. They will not listen to reason. They will not yield to authority. You cannot make them do or feel anything that you want them to do or feel.
But you can forgive them. You can tell a joke, even if you are telling it on yourself. You can do the one thing that will do the most to make them feel better… listen to their actual concerns.
If you are as goofy and cartoon-obsessed as me, you may remember that Popeye the sailor was known for the catchphrase, “I yam what I yam”. And if you do remember that, it will not surprise you that, when told a yam is another name for sweet potato, Popeye was furious. “It cannot be!” he argued. “I would not say I sweet potato what I sweet potato! That’s ridicumess!”
Well he has a point.
But I would like to talk today about the things that I sweet potato, and why I sweet potato those things.
First of all, I yam a humorist.
I yam this thing not because I am funny. You may think I yam funny because I say really goofy things for no apparent reason, and then keep on talking long enough to convince you that I did have a point to make, but my brain leans so far to the left that I am hardly right about anything.
And I make bad puns a lot.
You see, I have to use humor constantly to deal with all the hard things in life, because being too serious in the face of the world’s basic uncaring cruelty only leads to depression and taking a beating from life. In fact, I can think of any number of situations in my past where I avoided a beating only because I made a joke that made the bully laugh.
So, being a humorist is a survival tactic. Humor keeps you alive.
You see someone like me has to face all the pain and heartache and cruelty the world has to offer by using humor. The real reason is that, when faced with a bad situation, if the humor gland can’t empty itself of all the jokes it produces, it will begin to swell. The humor gland is located either in the brain or maybe in the behind (I am not medically qualified to tell you which it really is), and it can only swell to a certain point, and then it will explode. This is very bad thing for you, if you survive it, and certainly unpleasant for anybody nearby.
But the joke, properly launched at the target, will make somebody laugh, even if it is only the humorist himself. And laughter is the best medicine. Unless it kills you. You have to be careful not to die laughing. The angels will be offended, and the demons will all laugh too.
But I yam not only a humorist. I yam also a teacher.
I began to realize that I might be a teacher when, in graduate school to get a remedial master’s degree to help with the fact that plain English majors all starve to death, I discovered I had a talent for explaining things in simple terms. And then, immediately afterwards, I discovered I had an even greater talent for being ignored while the people I was explaining to made the mistakes they wouldn’t have made if only they had listened to me, before they failed spectacularly, and then realized how the solution I had explained would’ve made them succeed instead. There is apparently no better way to learn an important lesson.
Teaching is, of course, a pretty cool job. You tend to have the summers off. And you get paid for summer because they split the amount of money you earn for the year (which considering what a babysitter makes on average per child and per hour is far too little for the hours you put in) into twelve monthly pittances.
Of course you are expected to have a university degree (although no teacher college in the world can teach you what you really need to know in order to face that many little monsters… err, darlings… every day) and preferably some grad school, and a certification to teach in your chosen subject, and an additional certification if you are going to teach more than one subject (and ESL and Speech and Journalism, all of which I was expected to teach, are separate certifications) and you have to take hours of additional training every single year, and you have to get re-certified every five years, and… Well, you have to be basically smarter and much better-educated than Bill Gates… But the school janitor will probably be making more money per month than you do.
Anyway, it’s a job you just gotta love. I yam a teacher.
And really, there are a whole lotta yams in my basket yet that I could tell you about. I yam a Red Skelton fan. I yam sometimes a nudist (when I don’t have to put on clothes to keep myself from scratching all my psoriasis-plagued skin off). I yam also an artist (of the type known as a cartoonist). I yam pig-headed sometimes, and I yam Grumpy sometimes (so I go from being Porky to one of the Seven Dwarfs.) I yam a lotta things. And my sweet-potato basket is large.
But I can’t talk about all of my yams today. Too many yams are bad for my diabetes.
But here’s one last yam. I yam a storyteller. And I have a free Kindle e-book promotion this weekend. The book is the first in my series of AeroQuest books. It is a science fiction story with a humorous bent. And I mean, it is seriously bent in some places.
So, click on the link and get yourself a copy. It’s funny. And I will save the other sweet potatoes for another day.
Catch a Falling Star 
What We Are About to Lose
The world is on fire. The heat is getting worse than it has ever been (in the time we limited sentient creatures have knowledge of.) There is a very real chance that the end of life on Earth is actually a short time away in the near future (a thing some religions have been predicting unsuccessfully for thousands of years.) What will it actually mean for us to be at the end of time (realizing that we are only talking about our pale blue dot in the near-endless universe?)
Here’s what we face. The greenhouse gasses, particularly carbon dioxide, are keeping the heat from the sun from radiating back out into space. Temperatures have already passed what a few years ago was described as the point of no return. The permafrost in the northern hemisphere is melting, releasing increasing amounts of methane, an even worse greenhouse gas, and creating a feedback loop that makes the problem overwhelming. The glaciers in the north and the ice shelf in Antarctica are melting, and sea levels are rising. Major coastal cities are not preparing fast enough for being underwater. Huge populations will be displaced and become refugees. Food-production systems will break down due to drought and unrest amongst workers in both farming and the distribution of food. The mounting expenses of battling these unbearable problems will destroy economies. More wars will break out to add to the misery Putin has already caused by war crimes in Ukraine. Eventually, nuclear weapons may cool the Earth with nuclear winter and stop the production of carbon dioxide by obliterating all manufacturing and depopulating the northern hemisphere. The cockroaches will inherit the Earth. Hopefully, as the dominant species, they will do a better job of managing the environment. But one never knows how they will handle it once they reach their own industrial revolution.
Politically, the party with the power denies the existence of the climate crisis. They are concerned with expunging any record of white-people guilt for any crimes against racial groups caused by slavery, Jim Crow laws, genocide against Native Americans, lynching, and any of the other fruits of racism from the history books. They are, after all, quite comfortable in all-white conservative bubbles of thought, and are easily offended by any defense of the Black Lives Matter group. They also focus on removing any suggestion of sexual ideas or knowledge from school books and libraries, because anything but Bible-touted notions of love and sex is pornographic, perverted, or somehow related to lifestyles they certainly don’t want to have anything to do with and prefer to legislate away. So, every effort they are willing to make to avoid the things in that previous killer paragraph involves loudly saying “No!” to any possible solutions to the problems that are going to kill us. Hopefully, the cockroaches won’t become Trumpist Republicans when they take over, giving their rise to intelligence and civilization a better chance of thriving.
It is probably still within our power to stop this relentless life-extinguishing future from happening. There are definitely people who understand both the scientific challenges and the value of all the things we will lose if we sacrifice the entirety of our future for short-term corporate profits (the things all the Republicans we will continue to elect will vote for because of where their priorities really lie.) The human population has shown repeatedly throughout history that they are resilient and inventive, and can overcome all sorts of evil if the will to do so is truly there.
I am a pessimist, which means I always prepare for the worst possible outcome. Fortunately, that way of thinking means I am usually pleasantly surprised at the outcome, and if it does turn out bad, at least I am prepared for that outcome.
So, if we are going to destroy our world and ourselves, I have to ask myself, was it worth it for us to have ever existed?
Can you look at the smiling face of a child and say the existence of the human race on planet Earth was not worth the effort?
And there are reasons to be glad we are here and we have a history that came before us. The Civil War and World War Two were both terrible things. But one eliminated legal slavery. The other eliminated fascist genocidal regimes from Europe and Japan.
We are able, as a species, to laugh at our own foibles, to create humor and music and literature and poetry. We were able to produce Shakespeare, Mozart, Rober Frost, Red Skelton, Robin Williams, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, Beethoven, Kurt Vonnegut, the Beatles, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Elvis, Goethe, Socrates, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, T. S. Eliot, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Julie Andrews, Johnny Carson, and the list could go on for days…
We were able to rise up from the ground, fly through the air, and eventually land on the Moon.
We were able to survive the Black Death, Small Pox, Ebola Virus, AIDS, and Covid 19.
We unleashed the power of the atom. We observed and learned about the far reaches of the galaxy and the many other galaxies in the greater universe beyond the Milky Way using only telescopes, mathematics, and the scientific method.
Is it enough to justify the existence of our race? You tell me. I foolishly think we are worthy to live on into the future, even if I myself will soon no longer be able to keep living. I hope to die of non-climate-crisis causes with peace in my heart. But I realize, too, that it depends on a lot of other people besides me. And I do not have confidence in all of them.
If there is a God who can help us, He is certainly welcome to make an announcement in the comments. But barring Divine intervention, what are you willing to do to move the question forward? I am doing what is within my power.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, irony, Liberal ideas, pessimism, philosophy, politics