Love in the Time of Climate Change (19 page)

“Nice paper,” I said. “Let's hope it remains fiction!”

“Thanks!” she said. “It's almost beyond belief that this man and this party are to be taken seriously.”

I nodded my head, So much for being free of bias.

“I mean, his economic policies are bad enough. Along with his stance on gay rights and abortion and women's issues and immigration and gun control, and God, everything else. But to deny climate change? To deny science? Wow!”

“Wow indeed!” I agreed, noticing how her freckles seemed to stop right at the midpoint of her neck, and how her hair was unraveling from the left pig tail. It was all I could do not to reach out and tuck it back in.

“Sometimes,” she continued, “in the depths of my despair, in my darkest moments, I think to myself, why do we let some of these people vote? I mean, if they're that ignorant, that uninformed, that, I don't know, silly, maybe they should be locked out!”

My god, this woman! I stumbled a step backward, closing my eyes to regain balance and composure, and leaned against the whiteboard for support. Talk about being on
the same page! Jesus! Everything she wrote or said was perfect.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Fine,” I replied. “Just fine.”

“Don't tell anyone I said that!” she continued. “About voting I mean. Not exactly a wholesome embrace of democracy!”

I zipped my mouth closed and mumbled, “My lips are sealed.”

“Two weeks and I can sleep again. Hopefully!”

“Vote early, vote often!” I said.

She laughed.

“See you next week?”

“I'll be here.”

I sat down on my desk and watched her leave, my eyes fixated on that unbelievably attractive zone between her waist and her upper thighs. Next week would be November. November!

Once again I thought about what Sarah had said: January was two short months away.

Mistrial Declared When Prosthetic Eye Pops Out Philadelphia — An assault trial over a fight that cost a man his left eye ended in a mistrial Wednesday when his prosthetic eye popped out as he was testifying, startling jurors
.

John Huttick was weeping on the witness stand in Common Pleas Court as he testified about the impact of losing his eye in the August
2011
fight in the parking lot of a bar called the New Princeton Tavern, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported
.

Suddenly, the $3,000 prosthetic blue eye popped out. Huttick caught it and cried out as two jurors gasped and started to rise
.

“I couldn't believe it just came out,” Huttick said
.

Judge Robert Coleman, who called it an “unfortunate, unforeseen incident,” granted a mistrial motion by defense attorney Eileen Hurley. He scheduled a new trial for March 3
.

— Associated Press

“D
ID YOU SEE THIS
?” Jesse said. “‘Mistrial Declared When Prosthetic Eye Pops Out.' Just when you think you've got the case nailed shut …
POP!
I've heard of ‘saved by the bell' but this is ridiculous.”

“Handy trick to have up your sleeve,” I commented after reading the short article on page 2 of the Gazette. “People pissing you off? You'd be like ‘Don't make me lose the eye!' Christ, no one would mess with you.”

“Truth. You know, there's a lesson here. This could be just the kind of thing the climate-change movement desperately needs.”

“A good bar fight?” I asked.

“Yeah, well, maybe that too, but I was thinking of something even more dramatic. Something not just eye-catching but eye-popping. Get the fucking jury's attention.
WAKE UP!
No more business as usual! Mistrial!”

I recounted this conversation to the Climate Changers the following Wednesday at their weekly meeting.

Generally speaking, the group ran their meetings efficiently and productively. They were action-oriented, and they did their utmost to keep themselves on-task and digression-free.

God knows our staff and faculty could learn a lot from them. Our Academic Affairs meetings were notorious for their rich depth of mind-numbing bullshit. Two hours of self-serving blather by the same-old-same-olds, whose gross propensity toward extreme verbal diarrhea, coupled with a profound inability to ever get to the fucking point, made for meetings straight from Hell. What could easily be summarized in a three-sentence e-mail would instead gobble up whole afternoons in seemingly endless, excruciatingly boring, and irrelevant monologues.

You know what they say about college faculty: put six together in a room and give them one manageable task to
accomplish. The result? Seven radically different opinions and eight convoluted courses of action, not a single one based on any semblance of sanity. To make matters worse, in the exceedingly rare instance that faculty
could
actually agree on a single course of action, administration would bypass it and end up doing whatever the hell it wanted to do anyway, with the state usually doing its utmost to sabotage even that.

Ahh, the joys of public higher education. Your tax dollars hard at work.

Or was it … hardly working?

Whatever.

Occasionally however, even the Climate Changers' best-laid plans strayed from the straight and narrow and lurched off-topic into the twilight zone. After all, meetings are meetings and human beings seem genetically prewired for procrastination and lunacy.

They loved the eye-popping article. I had to read it to them four times. (Hannah laughed so hard she had to leave the room to pee.) The unfortunate result of all the hilarity was that the focused discussion on fundraising strategies for new photovoltaics on campus quickly dissolved into a rollicking, irreverent brainstorm unconstrained by reality.

The Climate Changers came up with the following:

• One: Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad and a few other theological movers and shakers appear together at a climate-change rally. Mohammad wears a tight T-shirt boldly proclaiming “No More Coal.” Jesus liberally uses the “F-word” when describing fossil fuels. Buddha sits, Buddha-like, in front of a gas-guzzling SUV and refuses to budge. All three emphatically state that there will literally be HELL TO PAY if we don't get our act together. Now!

• Two: The United States military unleashes a wave of drones that take out the fifteen dirtiest coal plants in the Ohio River Valley. They give a respectable heads-up so that no one is killed. The president defends his actions, emphatically stating “there can be no compromise in the defense of Mother Earth!” The public loves it and clamors for more.

• Three: Oregon invades Nevada, constructing settlements and building huge photovoltaic arrays. The Oregon governor justifies such action by stating “Oregon is just way too fucking rainy, and Nevada has so much more sun than we do. It's just not fair!” The Nevada governor retaliates and orders elementary schoolchildren to occupy Oregon's hydroelectric plants. The U.S. military intervenes with even more drone strikes on random coal plants.

• Four: Three hundred thousand Southern Baptists and born-again evangelicals stage a sit-in on a hill in Appalachia slated for mountaintop removal. They issue a joint statement blasting coal as “the opium of the devil.” “Where is electricity mentioned in the Bible?” they ask. They further emphatically announce that “only by rejecting the satanic temptation of fossil fuels can we aspire to ascend the sustainable stairway to the kingdom of Christ.” Millions join them.

• Five: A climate-induced mega-storm sweeps across the United States, resulting in seventeen states becoming completely submerged underwater. Again, enough heads-up notice results in zero fatalities. Coincidently, these states just happen to be “red” ones represented by climate-change-denying lunatics in Congress. With those states no longer existing, Congress is reconfigured, the right's stranglehold on sanity is lifted, and comprehensive climate-change legislation banning all fossil-fuel plants is overwhelmingly passed. Just to be on the safe side, the federal government drone-strikes all of the remaining coal plants for good measure.

It was a great meeting. Totally nonproductive but a great meeting.

—

It was strangely prophetic that on the very next Monday, October 29, 2012, Super Storm Sandy, the second-costliest hurricane in U.S. history, slammed into the Eastern Seaboard. Fourteen-foot tidal surges took out homes, business, infrastructure, and anything else silly enough to be in its path. New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut were devastated. Parts of New York City were underwater. Even with relentless advance notice, more than 100 people in the United States died from storm-related causes. Thousands became homeless and millions more were without power, many of them for weeks. Estimated damages were in the $60-plus billion range.

Be careful what you wish for!

Unfeeling bastards that we were, Jesse and I were initially grateful, almost gleeful. Safe and stoned in stormless Western Massachusetts, we had been granted a day off thanks to our governor declaring a state of emergency. That hellhole of an Academic Affairs meeting that I absolutely loathed and detested was cancelled. Hallelujah! I felt like those adolescents in Britain when the Nazis took out their school. Thank you, Sandy!

In the beginning, with the storm pummeling the East Coast and the two of us glued to the telly, we both felt an almost apocalyptic giddiness at her stunning ferocity.

Vindication was upon us! The time had finally come to pay the piper!

“
Go, Sandy, go!
” Jesse screamed, in a voice usually reserved for a Tom Brady touchdown.

“Come on, Ma Nature, it's payback time! Show the motherfuckers who's the boss!”

“Wake them up!” I cried, pumping my fists. “Give those climate-denying anti-science assholes a one-two punch!”

“Kick 'em in the privates!”

“Just do it!”

It's after times like these, blinkered by OCD and egged on by the Roommate, that I become painfully aware of just how much of a complete and utter fool I actually am. Here we were, cheerleaders for destruction. Applauding devastation. Hooting and hollering as fury unleashed itself on millions.

Clearly not our finest hour.

As gruesome images of the wrath of Sandy unfolded, glee quickly dissolved into guilt. Bodies washing up. Untold death and devastation. Homes, schools, stores, hospitals, and factories destroyed or shut down. No lights, no power. Dreams shattered.

We both felt terrible.

As always, Jesse laid the blame game squarely on my shoulders.

“I knew it!” he said. “You're the devil! The second coming of Satan! You wanted this to happen just so you could say ‘I told you so!'”

“Shut up. This isn't funny. Don't joke about shit like this.”

He fell to his knees and made the sign of the cross.

“Be gone, devil! Leave this world! Go back to the fiery depths of Hell and make it burn even hotter with your sorcery and wrath! Let the earth live!”

There are times when people carry jokes too far. This was one of them.

I managed to muster one of my rare holier-than-thou faces, got up, and left the room, queasy and nauseated.

—

In the difficult days that followed, a stark, painful possibility
emerged that maybe, just maybe, a tragedy of this magnitude could actually get folks to connect the climate-change dots and derive some sort of meaning out of madness. That this horrific kick-in-the-ass could provide a rare teachable moment and prompt real change.

Michael Bloomberg, the Republican mayor of New York City, ended his endorsement silence and threw his support to Obama for president. Climate change was the tipping point, and the stark distinctions between the political parties on The Issue forced his political hand.

The headline of
Bloomberg Businessweek
, a major conservative business magazine, screamed out: “It's Climate Change, Stupid!” For a brief moment, the press was all over the topic.

Even the general public had turned off their reality TV shows and tuned into the real world.

For one brief, fleeting moment … and then quickly most of us ducked right back under the veil of denial. Back to business as usual—or unusual, as the case may be. It's stunning how quick we are to accept a new normal, no matter how screwed up it was.

The tragedy of the human condition: the pathetic length of our attention span. Thirty minutes of concern, the length of a sitcom, and then—
poof!
Out of sight, out of mind.

Halloween morning, with Sandy's horrific aftermath making the holiday, for once, a truly scary one, I came down to breakfast to find Jesse cackling hysterically over the morning paper.

“Oh God, what now?” I asked, knowing his sense of humor was continually piqued at the dysfunctional, the awkward, the bizarre.

“Charge-pocalypse!” he laughed, shaking his head.

“Charge-what?”