What Me Worry?
“Things continue as they were since the beginning of the world,” is a saying from my early 20s heard while sitting in a college class room. The language has to do with the natural tendency to extend the present pattern of experience backwards and forwards. The denial of change is our default, our longing for a steady state, for things to be as they appear to be, and nothing more. Change is inconvenient. We must adapt, spend energy to reconfigure our niche, or in the extreme find a new one.
These considerations were prompted by a series of email exchanges with a friend who denies that climate change is a human driven phenomenon. I am on the opposite side of this issue. My friend does not think that it’s an issue at all, that anything is at stake, and that a collaborative effort to do anything about it would be a massive expensive mistake. I on the other hand, see the warming of the oceans, the melting ice caps at the poles, as the harbinger of eco-cide. My friend stated that he wished that he could allay my anxiety. This seems as absurd as if one held a loaded revolver to my temple while exclaiming with delight about the wonderful day we are having today.
Neither my friend nor I are in a position to shift the perspective of the other. We are members of two distinct communities. Even the vocabulary and syntax of our speaking betrays the significant differences between the two communities.
What I fear most is the potential for rejection of civil discourse between these two communities. That is when one side decides to brand the other as a tribe of lying, untrustworthy, power hungry, crazed fanatics meriting persecution. When the talking stops……
Language is thin ice over a deep dark pond and we are dancers over the ice, writing with our skates….and the ice is always at the point of melting.
—George Szirtes
