SOME QUICK THOUGHTS ABOUT...

...I drove up to The Berkshires with my youngest on Monday and immediately came down with what I decided is a summer cold, felt feverish for a few days, laid around and slept and listened to some podcasts, until yesterday when I felt a little better and ended up having a late dinner with my youngest's closest friend up here, a charming and articulate teenager who he considers his "sister," and her mother and other extended family and "family" members making me feel like I didn't entirely waste the week, though to be honest I never feel like I'm wasting time, since the brain operation, because in the recovery from that I discovered how rich each moment of awareness is, awareness of anything really, even just the passing of that moment.

Well, that wasn't as quick a thought as I intended. But hopefully here's a couple that are.

For those I hear despairing about the world situation here's some consolation:

The world has never been as violent, destructive and murderous as it was during World War Two, which dwarfs all war and mayhem that has come in the almost seventy years since.

The world economy has never been as desperate and weak and collapsed and stunted as it was during The Great Depression, so no matter how bad things feel economically, it's been worse and most people not only survived it but many grew stronger as a result of it.

 Unfortunately the same can't be said about climate change. Core ice samples from the world's ice caps (including mountaintop snow in Peru that has been there for thousands of years) show that despite rightwing propaganda (i.e. lies) there has never been the kind of rapid spike in world temperatures we are seeing now (latest data shows that whereas the ratio between record-breaking high and low temperatures was one to one for most of the history of record taking, it spiked to two to one in favor of high temperature records being broken at the turn of this century but now has reached ten to one, meaning for every time a low temperature record is broken ten records are broken for highest temperature ever for that day etc.

Not great news, unfortunately, and another sign of how our world is controlled by a handful of corporate interests (in this case energy corporations, mostly oil companies) who in turn control rightwing media and think tanks and politicians etc. The ramifications are already being felt, obviously, and more to come, battles over water rights, crop failures etc. But nonetheless, as the great calamities of the 20th century proved, civilization, humanity, we—at least some of "we"—can survive. And as in WWII and The Depression, learn lessons that create fertile ground for the kinds of "liberal" policies and planning that led to avoidance of another world war and another Great Depression, though rightwing Republican policies have brought us closer to those possibilities in recent years as rightwing revisionist history has tried to erase the lessons learned and prevent new ones from being learned vis a vis the environment.

Not so quick either, but what's on my mind this hot and humid day in The Berkshires, though a lot less hot and humid than it is back in Jersey and most of the rest of the country where more records are being broken and that ratio mentioned above is probably spiking even higher.