The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

If you think it’s depressing thinking about climate change, polar bear extinctions, massive flooding, killer heat waves, famine, new diseases, melting glaciers, water wars and millions of refugees fleeing their uninhabitable countries, think how the kids must feel. I’m in my 70’s, probably not going to see the worst of what’s coming, easy to pull the covers up and go back to sleep. With all the cynicism accumulated over those decades, I don’t see much hope we’ll all make the sacrifices necessary to prevent this planetary greenhouse from becoming a steaming hotbox of scarcely imaginable nightmares.

Pity the kids. We mutter about existential threat and they hear the runaway train barreling down the tracks straight at them with no way off. Thanks, Mom, thanks, Dad. Thanks for not making any sacrifices. Don’t bother turning down the thermostat, don’t buy an electric car, don’t stop burning coal in those power plants, don’t do anything that might inconvenience you. Just stick your head in the burning sand and pretend you’ll be okay, you’ll be fine. Like the bumper sticker on the 40 foot RV reads, WE’RE SPENDING OUR GRANDKIDS’ INHERITANCE. There’s a chuckle for the next generation.

Sacrifice? It’s not a word in the Boomer lexicon. We got ours and nobody is going to take it away from us. Vote for carbon taxes? You gotta be kidding me. Vote for saving the planet? Not if it cuts into our savings. Half of us just figure it’s too late to bring the CO2 down, too late to save the polar bears, too late to keep the global temperatures from rising every year, just turn on a rerun of the Simpsons and pop a beer. Vote for a Neanderthal like Trump. What, me worry? Worst case, we’ll move somewhere with a nice climate, at least for a few years.

And besides, we got advanced science working on solutions. Over our heads, but hey, good chance these egghead A Eye guys will turn the world thermostat down, forget this gloom and doom drumbeat, we’ve got folks working on this. Not that we want to fund them. But … gee, a little seed money, they’ll figure out a way to monetize it. Look at Facebook. Look at Google. Check out Amazon during the commercial break. Little startups, now kings of the universe. And I mean universe.

No, the kids will be okay. You know, if we just stop scaring them with all this pessimism.

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