Having A Knife In a Gunfight: Taking Arms Against A Sea of Troubles

IN 2002, I, like multiple millions of middle aged turn of the century dial up America Online addicts, met people in what were then called "chatrooms", and ended up forming digital cyber 'friendships:, and getting dates. I got smart early: any woman who wanted to go to the expense and trouble to fly halfway across the country to visit me, fine. feel free. knock yourself out. I wasn't going anywhere. I was damned if I was going to leave my beautiful hundred and twenty pound German Shepherd for even a few days, spend big money, hop on a plane, and fly off into the sunset to meet some woman I had only seen in pictures on a computer screen, which, for all K knew, might be twenty years old, or might be of Miss America nineteen sixty three. I reckon maybe half a dozen ladies showed up at my doorstep. Flattering, to a point, but the awkwardness outweighed the romance. People are people; we tend not to be comfortable when thrust into intimate circumstances with essential strangers. One time I hit the jackpot. A wealthy married lady whimsically sent me a plane ticket to Hollywood Beach Florida and arranged for a hotel room for me, alone, when I got there. All this because I had made some off hand remark about never having been to Florida, and kinda wanting to go, sometime. I walked into the hotel, up to the check in desk, still having not actually seen the ocean, so I asked the desk lady about it. She looked at me like I was crazy, which I might well have been, and thrust her thumb backwards over her shoulder. Out back, through that door right behind me, can't miss it. May I take a quick peek? Again, the you're crazy look. Sure, sir. Sure enough, there it was, in all its curved, endless, swaying glory. The water line wasn't more, I swear, than twenty feet from the hotel's back door. Build 'em close, pack 'em in, no worries. Over the ensuing years, what with sea level rise and all, I have often wondered how close the ocean is to that check out desk now. Getting closer, inching up, beyond doubt. I hear that now it floods every day in Miami Beach, that the ocean inundates the sewer system, that teenagers float on surfboards above coastal highways. Miami, Florida has somebody they call a "resiliency officer", currently a nice looking middle aged lady with a determined demeanor and a college degree of some sort. This office was created in 2008, a good, solid seeming civic response to impending doom, and is perhaps the answer to all our problems, but maybe not. She has her work cut out for her, or, a better metaphor, washing up towards her. All over the world, humanity is beginning to awaken to the fact that half the world's population will, within a few decades, be underwater; either that, or somewhat removed from its current pretentious position perched upon the sandy beach. Florida, a slender finer of land, a few miles wide, jutting down into the vastly outsized Caribbean, that sort of thing. the Norfolk naval base, gone, inland. Washington D.C., pumping like mad, losing ground, becoming an ocean. Since the United States government and the Florida state government currently prefer to pretend that there is no such thing as climate change, place like Miami Florida have to deal with it, ALONG WITH THE REST OF US. Somebody has to do something about these Chinese left wing hoaxes, after all. Miami, and apparently other cities around the world all plan to do the same damned thing: build elevated roads and highways, pump water like crazy, build sea walls, since walls are back in style, pray, and move back a bit. Move everything back, a bit. As if climate change and rising sea level is an inconvenient problem which can be remedied by an appropriations bill and some civil engineering. We still don't get it, do we?