Life As Performance Art 36

It's a beautiful Saturday morning of yet more summer in May. Rather similar to last year, when that entire month was uncommonly warm and July-like, giving way to a damp and chilly June, followed by real summer and scorching temperatures and bush and forest fires and smoke-clogged air so that for two weeks in August it all looked like the Apocalypse looming over us. This seems to be part of a new pattern in our weather: cold winters, hot summers and beautiful springtime. It's also dryer. This is climate change in action and it probably is largely caused by human interference with the planet's weather systems. There is actually little room for doubt. Some people think we can still beat climate change. I am not so optimistic. Then there are those who think this is the end of the world and we will all be wiped off the planet by 2050. Meh, methinks not. Here is how it's going to happen. While populist leaders and demagogues keep lying to their people and toadying to Big Oil and Fossil, and while the rest of us do the little we can to sweep the sidewalk clean before the tornado hits, it is all going to come crashing down on us at once, and we are going to be in lots of big trouble. I think we will get through it, but a lot of people are going to suffer and there could be millions of deaths, mostly poor and vulnerable people. Canada will have to welcome millions of climate refugees and we can only hope wish and pray that our country will retain throughout the coming catastrophe our reputation for sanity, common sense and good will. In the meantime, we all do what we can, or so we like to think. I have been big on the three R's, reuse, reduce and recycle, I think, since I was a teenager, some almost fifty years ago, and decades ahead of my time when all my peers were only interested in getting a good job after graduating, two nice cars, and getting laid frequently, and no one thought even once about the welfare of the planet, much less other species. Now, everyone wants to perfect themselves. You know, getting your makeup and hair just right as you're getting ready to face the firing squad. Yesterday a friend and I (we are exactly the same age, though sometimes I do like to remind him that he is eighteen hours older than me!) were talking about how we are both looking forward to a good healthy and robust old age in our nineties. Then I mentioned how just a few years ago, it was considered so strange that you wouldn't be already broken down and decrepit if you lasted that long, that it was simply considered normal. Now, with all the super-seniors we are hearing about who are running marathons in their nineties, if there is anything wrong with you once you hit your seventies, folks are going to wonder why you didn't take better care of yourself. But, Gentle Reader, I really can't help but read something else into all this desperation for self-improvement, perfection and uber-wellness. It is really as though we're delaying the already inevitable, and not simply this irrefutable fact that we, like all living things, have been genetically-programmed to die. It is even more than this. We all feel, subconsciously, rightly or wrongly, that none of us have a lot of time left, or that if we do, it is still going to be something rather difficult, ugly and painful, and we don't want to be reminded. Well, how about a compromise? Let's still take good care of one another and ourselves, let's still do what we can to shore up for the coming disaster, and let's really focus on gratitude and lovingkindness. This isn't going to keep us from dying. And it isn't going to magically buffer us from drastic and disastrous climate change. But we will be better prepared to face what is coming, work with it, and most important of all, live and work with one another in the hopes of rediscovering community in our midst.