Procrastinating, and Sharing A cell With Jane

THE POWERS OF THE EARTH gathered together, representationally, in Madrid, for the purpose of arriving at a global agreement on decreasing carbon emissions for the purpose of salvaging what's left of the earth's ecosystem. They even harbored the increasingly vain hope that humanity might restore what it has destroyed. They spent two weeks mealy mouthing about a bit, then adjourned without anything substantive agreed, as if solving the problem were optional, as if there existed the option of dealing with a minor matter at some future date. Heaven forbid that saving the environment, and the life which once thrived in it, ever became expensive to our corporate masters, I am reminded of the nearly innumerable diabetic people I know who awaken of a morning, grab a donut or two, well sugared, then rush home to shoot up, only to return for more pastry. No matter, we can concern ourselves with rising sea levels, decreasing oxygen levels in the oceans, and increasingly violent weather another day, maybe next year. Meanwhile, folks living next to Chesapeake Bay see their property slowly inundated, surfboards break out just above coastal highways, and Pacific islanders adorn wading boots. Jane Fonda and Greta Thunberg are swimming upstream, against a strong current of ignorance submerged beneath an apparent human death wish. Fonda, now 81, has moved to Washington D.C., and acquired the habit of getting arrested every Friday evening for the unspeakable crime of trying to convince the nation and the world that we had better do something. She's 81 now, beautiful and smart as ever, if a bit less impulsive, and points out that when she was born, there were a scant two million people on board, and that her childhood was spent amid flocks of birds which no longer exist, there being three billion fewer of them in North America than in her childhood. The passenger pigeon, it appears, will soon have company, in heaven. When Jane posed sitting on a piece of North Vietnamese artillery, back in the sixties, her detractors may have had a point. That was, after all, a bit over the top. But just for the record, we who opposed and protested the war were proven correct, in the scholarship of historians, if not the conservative community. This time Jane is dead on, even at the risk of spending three months in jail upon her next inevitable infraction. I'd like to share a cell with her, just to talk, and, with any luck, to hold her courageous hand.