We are on fire and it’s only getting worse. During this Fourth of July holiday week, we endured the four hottest days in modern Earth history, or at least since we started keeping records of such things in 1940. The planet experienced the hottest June ever recorded. Heat has ripped across the world from the south and southeastern US to India. The ice in Antarctica is at record low levels. The average world temperature on Tuesday was 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest ever. We keep burning oil, gas and coal and not listening to the climate scientists who keep telling us we have to change our behavior or make Earth an unlivable hell. And while we burned up celebrating our nation’s birthday, some of us didn’t make it to the end of the week because we continued to lead the world in mass shootings.
Global warming and our love of guns are killing us slowly and instantly. We just keep spewing heat trapping greenhouse gases into the air. Even the scientists are shocked by the oven we have created. The New York Times quotes a senior researcher at the University of Miami Brian Mc Noldy, “It’s so far out of line of what’s been observed that it’s hard to wrap your head around. It doesn’t seem real.” But it’s very real and the experts have been telling us for years. Throwing gasoline on the fire is a seasonal weather system from the depths of the Pacific Ocean called El Niño. It shifts heat in and out the ocean. The effects of El Niño will peak later in the year causing temperatures to get even hotter next year. Trying to control and reverse this smoldering threat to humanity will take a world wide effort of cooperation to change the way we live. Time will tell if we succeed.
This week also showed us that we in America allow death to come to our front door on a daily basis. We are numb to the mass shootings. This week, as people celebrated the holiday, bullets and death filled the parks and streets of Baltimore, Philadelphia and Ft. Worth just to name a few. People with guns, in many cases teenagers, who shouldn’t even have them, feel emboldened to fire indiscriminately over a perceived slight or are mentally ill and can buy a gun on the right street corner. The shooter in Philadelphia used an assault rifle and a hand gun called ghost guns. You buy a kit on line and assemble an untraceable gun. The city of Philadelphia is suing two makers of such guns. But the problem is us. We, as a country, are willing to tolerate daily mass shootings like no other place on earth. We elect people who refuse to make common sense decisions about guns because of the Second Amendment written almost two hundred fifty years ago when the country was a very different place.
We should celebrate America every year. It is one of the monumental achievements in history. We have done great things and we have done terrible things. We have recognized many of the bad things and many of us have tried to address and change the wrongs. We’ve had some success, but new challenges demand we look at ourselves and make the smart choices for the survival of the great American experiment. We need to wake up and smell the smoke and the fire outside our front door.
Not much to say. You covered the two issues succinctly. It appears that as a civilization we’ve decided consciously or subconsciously to ride our current behaviors to the bitter end.