We’re Not Going to Hell Fast Enough
Our delusions are killing us
--
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ July 20, 2022
It would be easier if everything went to hell faster. Unfortunately, we are not designed for long, slow declines with intermittent pauses as if nothing is happening. We get confused and forget what is happening.
Planetary heat waves happening to other people are problematic but not fatal. Thousands of old folks collapsing and dying from heat in Spain, Pakistan, or England fall into the handy category of ‘not us.’
When it is us, a percentage of our population will put up with it for a week and then tell people, shoot me already. Of course, they don’t mean it, but at some point, they do.
The planetary disasters resulting from climate destruction are so alien to our nature that we have no adequate response. It’s not supposed to be this way. So seeing foreign disasters as something affecting us is not correct.
This constitutional failure is the cause of our descent into mindless denial. Also, disastrous conditions are often experienced as cumulative but are not understood emotionally as having a common cause.
Without much mental effort, we do not link bad influenza cases with planetary warming. Likewise, destructive storms, floods, or droughts are related to weather but not directly connected to global warming. Hence the inevitable stupidity of some politicians denying climate change because of unseasonable cold.
Pandemics due to climate change also fail to connect to all the other aspects of the climate disaster and are dealt with individually, allowing them to be denied or ignored. The combined effects of global warming, population density destroying animal habitats, and zoonotic pandemics are not understandable.
For example, diverse and linked environmental disasters are seen as individual disasters rather than evolving integrated disasters. Likewise, factoring in growing numbers of climate refugees infected with pandemic diseases and starvation from planetary climate disruptions is too tricky for most people even before political opportunists get involved in spreading lies.
