Aversion
Therapy
 There
is an astonishing number of people in this country who believe that
climate
change is not presently accelerating, which is all
the proof you need that
the overriding human condition is denial.
It's not their fault, really. Being willfully ignorant has
turned out to be a useful key to the eventual success
of mankind as a species.
Think about it... it's 500,000 B.C. and you're up in a tree
in Olduvai Gorge. If you'd constantly worried about the creatures
lurking in the deep grass of the savannah,
waiting to crack your skull like a walnut and suck the marrow
out of your bones, you'd have fretted yourself into a coronary.
Instead,
you
chose
to think
about something else,
like the ticks investigating your testicles or those bright
specks of lights up in the sky.
"Ooooh. Pretty."
Modern man still does the same thing.
We don't think about how that cheeseburger we're having
for lunch is contributing to the destruction of the rain
forest.
La-la-laaaa.
We refuse to accept the harsh and difficult-to-comprehend
findings of science because our gods have all the answers.
<Tuneful hymn goes here>
We don't for a moment consider ourselves as a statistically
meaningless entity among six billion others as we're
too busy assembling a complete collection of commemorative
plates.
<Do a little happy dance>
We all realize that the hideous bugblatter beast of
Trall will not kill us as long as we have a towel over
our heads, knowing full
well that
it's so stupid that if we can't see it, it can't see us.
(Thank you, Douglas Adams)
We still look up at those same lights in the sky but we don't
say to ourselves, "I wonder which one is the asteroid that'll
make my whole collection of Paris Hilton lunchboxes moot?". But
we should.
Luckily for us, there exists a cadre of adults who look at
the available data and try to find answers to problems, to
keep the wells from running dry, to keep our livers functioning,
to
care
about the continued function of Earth as a cradle for Man.
These are the truly evolved humans, the ones who'll have
to be dragged kicking
and
screaming into oblivion.
Bless 'em.
=Lefty=
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