a cure for the global warming crisis

So, this afternoon the family piled into the car (not the big ‘ol van, because its carbon footprint is Sasquatch-sized) and headed to Costco for strawberries and an iPod accessory. When we finished our shopping and headed back to the car we found the vehicle parked next to us with plenty of bumper stickers on the back.

“Another family for peace”

“IRAN(Q)’

OK, everyone is entitled to their opinion on the war. But, the following sticker started quite a conversation in the Cielo-mobile:

“After we rebuild Iraq, can we rebuild our schools?” and had a picture of a child at a desk with his hand raised. Well, where do I start?

Yesterday I heard a report on revisionist textbooks currently being used in public middle-and-high school Social Studies classes in Maryland schools. Here’s an excerpt from the Charlotte Examiner’s article:

Sewall complains the word jihad has gone through an “amazing cultural reorchestration” in textbooks, losing any connotation of violence. He cites Houghton Mifflin’s popular middle school text, “Across the Centuries,” which has been approved for use in Montgomery County Schools. It defines “jihad” as a struggle “to do one’s best to resist temptation and overcome evil.”

When I do an internet search on the word jihad I get this:

1. Islam. An individual’s striving for spiritual self-perfection.
2. Islam. A Muslim holy war or spiritual struggle against infidels.
3. A crusade or struggle: “The war against smoking is turning into a jihad against people who smoke” (Fortune).

Oh, another bumper sticker from the same vehicle was the chestnut “If going to church makes you a Christian, does going to the garage make you a car?” Little girl didn’t quite understand the logic of that one, so we started explaining it to her in terms she could understand.

Mom: Remember the report on Seattle’s proposed ban on bonfires because they contribute to global warming? It’s that kind of logic. If bonfires on the beaches of Seattle contribute to global warming, then doesn’t it stand to reason that forest fires contribute even more to global warming?

LG: Oh, yeah. I get it now.

Well, we decided to push that logic to it’s inevitable conclusion and Ta-Da! we solved the global warming crisis. Really, we did. Follow me here.

Yes, it is true that forest fires contribute more to the crisis than Seattle’s bonfires. Most forest fires are started by lightning. So, logically, shouldn’t we ban lightning too?

But, we can’t ban lightning until we ban thunderstorms, because they are the generators of the electricity that manifests itself as lightning, causing forest fires that contribute to global warming.

But, we can’t ban thunderstorms until we ban condensation, because it creates the storm clouds that generate the electricty that manifests itself as lightning, causing the forest fires that contribute to global warming.

But, we can’t ban condensation until we ban evaporation, because the water molecules that condense into the clouds that generate the electricity that manifests itself as lightning, that causes the forest fires that contribute to global warming, must first evaporate.

Well, how do we ban evaporation? Seems to me like we need to ban water, and the world’s limited water resources are recycled through the circle of rain, evaporation and condensation. Everyone knows that rainforests act as the world’s thermostat by regulating temperatures and weather patterns. But how do they do this?

Well, trees in the rainforest breathe carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (that’s good, it’s using some of the CO2 greenhouse gasses) and give off oxygen into the atmosphere. That oxygen combines with hydrogen to create, WATER. The water then evaporates into the atmosphere, where it condenses, forming thunder clouds that generate electricty that manifests itself as lightning that strikes the earth’s surface, starting forest fires that contribute to global warming by putting CO2 into the atmosphere. 

Of course, the rainforests are supposed to remove that CO2 from the atmosphere, but since they helped put it there in the first place, (see logic above) then, if we remove them they can’t participate in the great circle of global warming contribution.

SO, LOGICALLY, if we ban rainforests we’ll be well on our way to solving the global warming crisis.

Under normal circumstances I would be donning my flame-retardant suit in anticipation of the flaming arrows that are inevitably coming my way as a result of this post. But, before you launch one in my direction, remember that fire contributes to global warming.

Insane, isn’t it? But no more insane than making sweeping generalizations about a war that began in 2003 causing the destruction of our school systems, when public school education has been in decline for, oh, at least 40 years prior to the beginning of the war that started in 2003 that has destroyed American public education. Or the sweeping generalizations about what does or does not make someone a Christian.

Back to the revised definition of jihad. While it is technically true that one of the definitions of jihad does not contain references to violence, one must also look at the meaning of the word in the context of its application. The jihad applied to New York and Washington that caused the war was certainly NOT non-violent. When we don’t use context to understand the world around us, we wind up with stupid arguments over warped logic.

Here’s another bumper sticker: “Am I liberal, or just well-educated?” You mean I can’t be well-educated if I disagree with everything liberal?

Where do I start?

 

 

Walking in this World

Got an email from an old friend last week. He’s getting ready to facilitate a “Walking in this World” group. WitW is a book by Julia Cameron. She wrote it about 10 years after her defining work, “The Artist’s Way.” I did the AW experience in fall of 2003 and it was quite an eye-opener for me. Several of us felt like we needed to repeat the course, or attend an “AW for Dummies” version or something. Well, here’s my chance. WitW starts in March. The premise is simple: we are all creative beings, built with a desire to create inherent to our very natures, put there by the ultimate Creator. Julia proposes that those of us who used to be very in tune with our creative nature because disillusioned or frustrated or just plain afraid to “put it all out there for everyone to see”, sort of hiding our lamp under a basket. She says a lot of things that make sense, and it’s easy to think about reconnecting to that creative side of ourselves, of myself, but it’s much more difficult to actually do the work.

It’s true. Doing the actual work of reconnecting with the creative self is scary. You have to be willing to start over, to be a rank beginner again, to possibly learn to do things differently than you used to, or even to do something totally different than what you used to do. I had that experience in AW. I walked in as a non-playing musician. I left 12 weeks later a fledgling writer, leaving several stupefied classmates behind, folks who could not believe that I was in reality a computer geek, and not a writer or actress or lounge singer or something. Go figure.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking the last couple of years, of wondering what I’m meant to be or do. And I don’t have any answers. I read blogs and first novels and poetry and then look at what I might have to say about, well, anything, and think to myself that I have absolutely nothing worthwhile to say about anything. My life is not about self-sustaining agriculture, or the size of my carbon footprint, or how my career gives me the opportunity to travel and see and do things that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Right now, today, my life is about trying to get my 18-year-old son to grow up, to be independent, and responsible, and trustworthy. And it’s about helping my daughter realize that it’s ok to be a tomboy without giving up being a girl, and that it’s ok to get frustrated and say no to people when they intrude on her privacy or try to take advantage of her generosity. And it’s about helping teenagers trust adults when they’ve lost the ability to trust their parents for whatever reason. Just everyday, ordinary things.

And my life has become focused on creating useful things, like socks that fit my feet perfectly because I made them to do that.

None of these things are earth-shattering. The future of our planet does not hang by a thread of anything I’m trying to weave together to make that thread stronger. And for that reason, I feel silenced by this writing. What difference is there in my choosing to record the mundane experiences of living in rural/suburban central North Carolina in 2008? If I’m not doing anything to fit into the media and political mold of world change, why do anything at all?

Do I really want to walk in this world?

I don’t know.

 

Whistling in the Dark

This is a little ditty I wrote yesterday. It actually wrote itself, I just copied it to paper. And it’s a little on the dark side, but whatever.

A Virtual Life

Virtual conception, procreated in a Petri dish, possibly from virtual parents who’ve never met. Virtual birth, broadcast live over the ‘net so that virutal family can share the ecitement of the blessed event without the inconvenience of travel of the annoyance of human interaction with real people.Virtual childhood: computers teaching pre-schoolers their ABC’s and 123’s, virtual playments living in the virtual world of the computer game.

 

Virtual education, from pre-school to post-doctorate, with teachers, professors, students, colleagues from the four corners of the world, all gathered in front of cameras and computers, sharing virtual ideas and imparting virtual knowledge, without ever having shared the same space, or breathed the same air.

Virtual communication with virtual friends: voice mail, e-mail, test messages sent and received without ever having met the real person behind the virtual images and virtual words.

Virtual friends, virtual lovers, virtual marriage, virtual sex, virtual entertainment, virtual addiction, virtual crime…virtual prison?

Virtual death: online condolences, paid by virtual acpuaintances who have no time or desire to physically comfort those who suffer an all-to-real grief.

Perhaps we just live forever, our virtual selves floating in virtual reality, with virtual pieces of our virtual existence roaming from one server to another without ever being purged, “ghosts in the machines.”

George Orwell wrote of the viewscreen, of the power it would have over society. And here we are.

Is there a real cure for our common virtual disease?

Does it even have a real name?Are we living a virtual life in a virtual world, or are we dead already?

 

Not Exactly Non-Negotiables

There are times when I really miss my brain, and the past week or so has been one of those times. The harder I try to put words together, the harder they are to find. However, I did find some words on a bookmark the other day that sort of fit in with the list of non-negotiables, so here they are:

Speak to people.

Smile at people.

Call people by their names.

Be friendly and helpful.

Be cordial.

Be genuinely interested in people.

Be generous with praise–cautious with criticism.

Be considerate with the feelings of others.

Be thoughtful of the opinions of others.

Be alert to give service.

OR, as my dad would say: Be alert; the world needs more lerts.