Making Misery A Habit

HABIT, said Goethe, is our only comfort. We dislike doing without even those  unpleasant things to which we have become accustomed. For example, a person who has spent half a century in prison does not necessarily want to be released into a strange, unfamiliar world. five years ago if someone had described in exact detail President Trump's administration, presidency, and behavior, no one would have thought such a thing possible. Now, it has all come to pass, and has been "normalized" as we like to say. During world War Two, the Germans bombed London daily and nightly for years, and Londoners became so accustomed to the blitz that after it finally ended they continued to behave as if it were still happening. it seemed strange to them to not be bombed. Therein lies the problem getting people and countries to take meaningful action against climate change. Nearly everyone old enough to remember weather patterns fifty years ago readily agrees that the climate has changed, that seasonal weather patterns are drastically different  now than they were in the nineteen sixties. When I was fifteen, in 1970, if someone had told me that in the year 2020 October would be a summer month with daily temperatures routinely reaching eighty five degrees where I live, that fall colors would begin to appear most years around Halloween, that it would never snow, and that spring would begin in late February,  and that violent storms and severe droughts would be normal, accompanied by vast wildfires sweeping large parts of the United States every year, I would have been shocked. It would have seemed like futuristic dystopian science fiction, of the sort I loved to read back then. Now, however, its reality. Now, I've adjusted to it, and expect it, although sometimes it still seems weird. People in high school and college today have never known any other type of climate, so they have to take climate change on faith, they have to take the word of old people and scientists. I am alarmed about climate change, but I should be more alarmed than I am. is seem to have become comfortable with it, even though I know it is a deadly threat to future life on Earth. We become habituated to our misery. We also take our progress for granted; our modern medical miracles, miracles unheard of fifty years ago, I calmly allow to assist me in keeping good health, without a second thought. By the time the climate changes become insufferable, I'll be long dead, and it will be too late for today's college students, who will have to adjust to the strange new world when they are the same age I am now. By then they might well be adjusted to it, acclimated to it, and satisfied to continue doing nothing about it. All I can do is wish them luck from my grave.