Filmmaker Francois Truffaut once said there’s no reason to make an anti-war movie. He said filmmakers should just as well make anti-iceberg movies because there’s no way to stop icebergs as well as there is no way to stop war. Well, we may one day stop icebergs by not having any. We may have to explain to school children what icebergs were and why one caused the sinking of the Titanic.
In the later 1980s, I caught a B-movie on TV called Equalizer 2000, set in a post-nuclear war Alaska. Needless to say the movie, filmed in the Phillipines, portrayed Alaska as a wasteland following the whatever happened. One day, Alaska might be like that awful movie that’s only claim to fame is that a young Robert Patrick made it before he appeared in Terminator 2 which also dealt with a nuclear war aftermath.
But we may never have to worry about a nuclear war. Considering that meteorologists at NASA are calling this past June as the warmest on record, the world will slowly get hotter and less inhabitable. And it seems every month so far this year was the hottest March, April and May on record. So, it leaves us to wonder what can we do because this might actually be the coolest summer many of us experience for a while or ever again.
It was about three years ago during the summer of Covid, I was talking with one of the workers at the supermarket I frequent and we both seemed to agree that the summer hadn’t been that bad compared to previous summers. The summer of 2019 was a hot one. But it later dawned on me, maybe it was cooler than normal because people had stayed home mostly for the past few months. People aren’t driving as much as they use to, ergo, the oil refineries aren’t working like they normally would. Air travel is down. Most people were just excited to get out that taking a leisurely stroll seemed like a good idea.
I heard something that went like 100 years ago if you had a car, you were considered rich. People were still using horses and horse-drawn carriages. Now, it’s considered luxury to own a horse. People have cars that and drive them just to back out of their driveway to check the mail. Even when the meteorologist warn us about “Ozone Days,” we drive as much as we want and gas up our cars because we look at it as the mentality that someone else can be eco-friendly. Our grass needs to be cut because we have too many weeds that don’t look right. Never mind the fact that we need the bees to help pollinate things.
We still chuckle and mock the people who are environmentalist. Government is cracking down on gas-powered cars and we are angry. President Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House and “that sumbitch Reagan” took them off. Some states have even made it illegal to have rain barrels. It’s all about making money off electricity, natural gas and water. Trying to argue the benefit of solar panels is like trying to debate a flat-earth believer. You can get sunburnt on a cloudy day just as much as on a sunny day. I know because I have. But they will argue that it’s a waste of time.
Donald Trump made some outrageous claims about wind turbines and wind energy and people believed him and still does. George W. Bush didn’t nothing more at his fake ranch in Crawford, Texas but cut down trees. What the man had against trees I will never understand. He’s sinced stopped playing cowboy to prove to Texans he was a good ole boy like them not some damned Yankee who was born in Conneticut. He seems to have settled into the suburbs of Big D where I’m sure his grass is cut on a regular basis and the only weeds are the ones the suburban white people smoke.
It was so easy to mock former Vice-President Al Gore that we overlooked the message he was saying in An Incovenient Truth. Even Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park backtracked and said they were wrong to mock him. It didn’t matter. The damage was already done. When “carbon footprint” entered the vernacular, it quickly became a phrase of disdain amongst right-wingers and conservatives. A guy I went to school with made it part of his bio on social media saying, “I want to have the biggest carbon footprint ever.”
Yet, they’ll complain when others leave trash on the ground. If they’re stuck in traffic and some douchebag in a big-ass truck is letting out all the black smoke exhaust, they’ll complain, mostly because it’s coming into their vehicles. They only care about flooding when their homes and property are affected. They only care about hotter summers and colder winters when it affects them personally.
And that’s why most of them won’t do much about it. They’re not getting anything immediately on their back end for changing. When West Nile Virus became the White Person Freakout Of The Year, no one understood how simple it was to take the extra time and make sure there isn’t much stagnant water around you. That’s how mosquitoes are born. And most don’t travel all over creation. They stick close to home.
Yet, when I was working as a reporter in Americus, there was a huge emphasis on why they weren’t spraying a lot of dangerous pesticides in areas that there are no mosquitoes. Yes, it will give off other insects and poison the vegetation, but even when there was a drought, people were still questioning the lack of spraying. The real incovenient truth is that people don’t want to be inconvenienced.
I mean the environment may improve in 10 years, 20 years or another generation. But if you know anything about the people who were raised in the post-WWII era (where it became more prominent to have a family car than ride a streetcar or bus), they’re not too keen on making the world a better place for anyone else. For God’s sake, just about every Gen Xer was exposed to second-hand smoke on a regular basis, do you think their elders give a frog’s fat ass they may have respiratory issues in their 50s?
The irony of the hippie counterculture movement using Volkswagens which were some of the least eco-friendly was lost on so much. Nevermind the fact that Volkswagen’s origin happened during the middle of World War II and the Third Reich and was intended to be a car for Nazi Germany. I mean to be honest, Henry Ford was reportedly a racist too but that’s a little too much awkwardness considering its later usage. I mean, I guess it could be inerpreted as how Mel Brooks makes fun of Hitler. But still, the older models became so hazardous to the enviroment, they even stopped manufacturing them in this country.
And while most younger people are wanting more walkable cities and towns, the infrastructures are struggling to maintain the heavy traffic and congestion. We still view public transportation like buses as something poor people ride and many cities don’t have a rail system for rapid mass transit. In many ways, it’s greed. People need to buy cars not bus passes. Most cities were forced to get rid of their streetcars.
We also hook them when they’re young. High schoolers are so anxious to get their driver’s license and cars. It’s not like they’re going to ride the bus with the rest of the lower-income students. And think how much the school can make over issuing parking spots. Yes, like so many things that are mandatory, you have to pay so much just to attend.
We’re never going to get a really good solution because no one is willing to take the smaller steps for it to happen. People dump trash into recycling bins that it basically defeats the purpose. And then most of the plastics aren’t being recycled but thrown into the landfills.
The more and more we continue to elect people who are controlled by the lobbyists and corporations, the worst things will be. People in New England and the Pacific Northwest may be one day telling their grandchildren (if the plastic contaminating us don’t make all mean sterile) what it was like before the was 100-plus each summer day.
So, if you’re not willing to step up, make a difference and keep electing greedy fat cats, then you shouldn’t be complaining about the weather.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 