Losing Energy, Karaoke Style

I MISSED MY FORTY FIVE YEAR since I graduated high school class reunion, as I had for the past few weeks thought I would. It was up in the air for awhile, then it fell to Earth, with a whimper. Too many Trump supporting climate change denying I don't care my life is fine my life is tough enough why should I care about carbon in the atmosphere class members. These are the same people who whip out their smart phones and show pics and selfies of themselves, their children and their grandchildren, and then get glassy eyed when I say something other than oh how cute they are, something like have you considered that these cute grand kids will be alive nearly a hundred years from now, but that they, assuming people like Trump remain in power and assuming that we continue to do hardly anything to stop the warming because of the apathy and selfishness of people like you, will likely live on a planet which is barely habitable, and becoming rapidly less so? A class reunion is supposed to be fun, not a climate change symposium and strategy for a sustainable economy convention, they might say. I might say that we had better start turning our class reunions, and everything else into climate change symposiums, and darned soon. Like World War Two, during which neighbors got together and plotted victory gardens and metal collecting get togethers. Every time the world's scientists announce new research findings, it gets worse, and has been for decades, which we the people have largely ignored. Now, the latest information is that by the year 2030 we will have run out of time, unless during the next dozen years we do about half a century worth of changing, starting now, which, as we all know, we aren't going to do. So, we're doomed. So why not go to class reunions, and have fun? Well, for one thing, at mine, this past weekend the only report I got was that they sang karaoke. Karaoke, and maybe a round of scramble golf. My immediate reaction was that I can go into darned near any bar in the country, any cheap bar, that is, with cultural deprivation, and sing karaoke with strangers while drinking myself into a stupor, and probably not be able to tell the difference in level of fun between stranger karaoke and high school classmate karaoke. precisely what, one might ask, is it with which you would so smugly replace karaoke? Not replace, I would respond, but augment. Cut the karaoke a bit short, and have....communication. We all leave high school on graduation day promising to go forth into the world and improve it, make it a better place. Let's give everyone, at each reunion, 10, 20, and especially 40 and fifty year reunions, an opportunity to stand before the class and tell exactly how and what we have all done to fulfill our high minded eighteen year old promise. Then, maybe,a bit more karaoke, only, I personally prefer a capella, which reveals the true voice. This would have been my seventh class reunion, and each of the previous six have been progressively a little less energetic, a little bit less well attended, and a little bit less relevant than the previous. so, I finally gave up the ghost. The inexorable slowing down of the class reunions rather reminds me, in a sardonic sort of way, of human culture and its response to its dire climatic future. Just sort of fading away while having a bit of final fun, not really caring, not rally noticing, going out with not a bang, but a karaoke whimper.