Invasive Species

     The grocery store boy bagging my purchases today griped to a friend standing nearby about the weather:
     "A couple days ago it was in the sixties, now it's in the twenties and it snowed, too."
     I stood waiting to pay, thinking, Climate change.  I also thought that if I had interjected with that statement it would've seemed trite.  One can have good intentions while making observations.  One can also annoy with the obvious.
     Someone I spoke with on the phone a few days ago scoffingly said the words, "Global warming," while referring to this year's unseasonably cold and snowy weather where he lives.
     I remarked, "You have to take the whole planetary system into account."
     The topic died there.  It's a complex subject, but if one looks at "hottest year on record" charts one should notice that the hottest, worldwide, was 2016; the hottest before that, 2015.  We're part of an upwards moving arc that, logically, will establish 2017 as the hottest year on record, with 2018 even hotter.  On the warm day the young man at the grocery store was referring to, I did my errands with my car's windows down and sunroof retracted.  The day's sunshiny February loveliness seemed like something out of late April for this part of the world, and, it still being winter, I was shivering in ten degrees Fahrenheit wind chill two days later.
     Climate change deniers in power and big business (including President Trump) have a vested interest in being stupid about humanity's fate on a planet turning inexorably into an alien world.  Their economic concerns override the needs of the majority, as has always been the case.  Arctic ice melting will help the oil industry.  Antarctica may someday become a heavily protected, and warm, luxury conglomeration of tax free mini-states with their own laws, allowing certain types of wealthy sadists to do anything they want to people kidnapped and brought there for their pleasure, a la Pasolini's film, Salò.
     Resource wars over water, crops, still fertile territories, will become the norm, as has been recognized by Pentagon theorists, who are not climate change deniers.
     The Arctic Rivieras, north and south, are coming.  Most of us will be in the class of the drink servers and room service attendants, the eaten killed and served to those wealthy ones who want to try cannibalism.  Yet, sometimes, as we should know from history, when backed against a wall, a people can make changes, usually through traumatizing and bloody resistance.
     Another Spring, like the Arab one a few years ago, is upon us.  People are networking and protesting, speaking out loudly against motherfuckers in power who need to maintain their favored status quo.  They need it, for they are afraid of us.  Because the motherfuckers in power want to keep their hold over us, they resist in the only way their brutal minds know--unleashing militarized cops, beefing up border patrols and militaries, increasing vile hate speech against resisters, and revving up their propaganda machines to near tachometer red.
     A favorite propaganda tactic of theirs is to scare people into believing "they," the terrorists, or illegal immigrants, are out to get us or take our jobs, or spread disease and import illegal drugs.  These same propagandists support a U.S. government that exports more weapons than any other nation.  Keeping the world chaotic works on behalf of the motherfuckers in power.  A common people of the United States, to use my own country as an example, fearful of terrorism is less likely to worry about important and far more impactful issues, like the income gap, health care, women's equality and rights in general, the rights of all who get regularly abused by the state and police, racism, corporate greed and the lack of punishment inflicted properly upon corporate criminals like the Wells Fargo Bank higher echelons who ripped off their customers in a deliberate scheme to rob them, ruining the savings of countless people.
     That last example occurred during the Obama administration.  I'm not suggesting he never spoke out against the Wells Fargo criminals, but I can't recall any strenuous objection on the former president's part.  When it comes to white collar crime, Obama is contemptibly mild in demeanor.  He did bail out Wall Street after all--there lie his priorities.  He also made it impossible for any Bush administration members to be prosecuted for committing war crimes.
     We must look forward, as American politicians like to say.  Their forward, though, is not ours.

                                                                               Vic Neptune