Capitalism, religion, and insanity.

"People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money. This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. How dare you!"
-- Greta Thunberg

I saw this earlier today.

I live in Michigan, about a hundred miles or so south of the 45th Parallel, halfway between the Equator and the North Pole. It's the first day of fall, and it's a sunny, warm day. This, in and of itself isn't terribly unusual, we can generally expect warm days right up until about the first week of October...or we could...in the last few years that threshold has crept forward about a week. The bugs have been bad this year...it's been a different thing every year for the last several years, but all things that rate as unusual to a guy that's lived a majority of his 45 years in various parts of Michigan.

I don't live in a state like Florida that is facing dramatic climate change effects.

But I can see it just the same.

How exactly, then, are politicians in general and conservatives in particular having so much difficulty seeing...and dealing with...things that are obvious problems?

The status quo may be lucrative, but anybody with a brain in their head will tell you that nothing goes on forever, and unless you want to get your ass kicked by reality, when things start to change you'd best adapt, and better yet find a way to get out in front of whatever it is...not just to maintain your profit margins, but to ensure basic survival.

Instead, Republicans in particular seem to think it's great fun to crap all over the environment, the functionality of our government, and damned near everything else...all the better if they can squeeze a few more dollars out of our system in the process.

And it's positively amazing how much hate they'll heap on a kid...or anybody else that speaks the truth.

All because they think they'll get money.

But you can't spend all that money if you're dead, or if the money itself has become worthless, and if you yourself become a refugee because the place you live in is now less habitable but you can afford to leave, other people like yourself will tend to take exorbitant amounts of your money from you, because after all their existence is obviously less threatened than your own and you want to continue to exist, right?

And the worst part of it, to me, is that these people apparently lack the imagination to even consider that anybody else might believe anything different, or hold any belief...differing or otherwise, sincerely enough to stick with it.

They sure don't.

Listen, people, if we don't get our heads out of our collective ass and start doing something, the exact sorts of hate and selfishness and stupidity that fuel conservatism, nationalism, Trumpism and all these other shitty beliefs are going to be what something or other chisels onto Humanity's tombstone.

There may well be other habitable planets out there. Don't get me wrong.

But humanity squandered the Space Age trying to find better ways to make more money instead of trying to break the Light Barrier. It was too hard, or we're all doomed anyway, or Jesus will save us, or none of the right people owned space technology companies at the time....or something.

So if there are other habitable worlds, we have no way to get there without Faster Than Light space travel.

We have to make our stand here, and make this shit work at least until something better turns up and we have the means to go there.

Or we die. I die, you die, my ferrets die, everything...including your profit margin, Mr. Old White Conservative...dies.

And no, there's no White Jesus going to swoop down out of the clouds and save you, let alone let you watch while the rest of us burn.

Personally, I don't think God works that way, and if He does than He is not worth following. It's quite funny to me at this point, how if you really look at it, all a lot of these "Believers" have done is simply made God in their own image.

I learned a long time ago, that we humans have the capability to cause our own End Times. One B-52H Stratofortress bomber full of AGM-86B cruise missiles, much less a whole Squadron or Wing of them, one ICBM squadron, one Ohio-Class Ballistic Missile Submarine...or by the same token, the Chinese or Russian counterparts to the same...could inflict incalculable suffering on Humanity simply by launching its payload. We know this, we invest incredible amounts of money and safety efforts and time in making sure that none of these weapons are used without proper orders and the crews are sane and we as a species have been damned lucky.

But why, then, when the world itself can wield so much more energy than we can...as I remarked recently one hurricane uses more energy in a day than all of the Earth's power grids do...why are the environment and nature not treated with the same levels of care?

A hurricane will destroy your city and kill you as surely as a nuke will, and one doesn't need radiation to make an area uninhabitable when one has enough water contaminated with animal and human waste or various chemicals.

Again, we humans have the capability through non-action, to make our own apocalypse.

Lately, I've been sporadically bombarded with nonsensical End Times crap by a former partner of mine, who apparently doesn't watch the News (or at best she does so very selectively.) She keeps pushing the same line of utter nonsense that she did back in the early 2000's, like her brain is stuck on some kind of weird loop or other, which given her own mental illness it probably is. She sends me these long, deeply weird rambling Emails that careen from the minutiae of daily life to the same old End Times Prophecy nonsense without warning...and no, she doesn't seem to know what a paragraph break is, so if anything I'll scan the Wall O' Text and point out (again) that she's nuts and the next time I hear from her it's just more of the same.

At this point, I'm having difficulty believing that I ever wanted to sleep with this woman.

She has no car, no job, no money and no prospect of anything without radically changing her own life. But she has convinced herself that God is going to give her a car, a house, money, etc. I don't know how anybody can live like that. It's gotten tiring enough that I'm probably just going to block her.

I understand some people live in desperate or shitty circumstances but, again, this runs afoul of my own actually-conservative upbringing and something in my brain just keeps shouting "If you don't like it, DO SOMETHING!!! You have the power to change your life!!!" Every time, in too many cases, it falls on deaf ears.

At best, these people including this particular ex, seem hell-bent on waiting for one of their "betters" that they approve of, to tell them some easy solution to all of life's problems...and of course there aren't any such things.

But if she's typical, oceans rise, cities fall and the world burns while Evangelicals and Pentecostals debate how many angels you can stick on a pinhead or rant about their prophesied role of protecting each other and hiding out from the Anti-Christ while eating Jim Bakker's survival taco meat. Where exactly are they going to have, I don't know, revival services in abandoned buildings and the basements of remote houses? I have no idea. Even as fantasies go, this one seems poorly thought out.

Climate change is a global problem, the guy locking Christian Latin American kids in cages and calling himself the "Chosen One" and the "King of Israel" is their President, and the Rapture is still a false doctrine.

And if you point any of this out...or point out just how much their beloved "End Times" would screw things up for a lot of creatures and people that never did anything to deserve such, it either goes right over their heads or they just get mad. Again, how did we as a people even get to this place of having so little regard for the lives of others?

And if you point out that we're causing our own End Times without any divine agency whatever, well then you're somehow against God.

It's our failure as a species, that despite all the knowledge we have amassed, we still have people like this. It's not cute or funny or useful that we have so many angry, mentally ill, reactionary, religion-addled or stupid people and I'm pretty damned sure in the long run it's not that profitable, either.

That this is so, is simply wrong.

We don't deserve Greta Thunberg, and she and her generation sure as hell deserve better than us.