Knocking Head Against Tree

THE GUY DID A GOOD JOB OF FIXING MY FURNACE. He told me that it needed a new computer control board of some sort, a more modern update, and I have no choice but to believe him. Anyhow, it works now. So excited was I to have heat that i opened my big mouth, and made small talk with him. One thing led to another, and that's where the trouble began. I entered the sordid cesspool of politics, with a conservative Christian who does not like redistributing wealth, rendering unto Caesar or giving unto the lazy drug addicted poor, and believes that anybody who believes in climate change is playing God, because how on Earth can anybody believe that we paltry little humans have the power to change the climate? Climate change, he said, he suspects is a trick to get people to redistribute wealth. I was afraid to ask him exactly how that works, how tens of thousands of scientists are conspiring to redistribute wealth by making up stories about climate change. When I mentioned that anybody who took high school chemistry can understand carbon, and how putting eight hundred fifty billion tons of it into the atmosphere and leaving it there soaks up heat, he informed me that he had take college chemistry. I suggested that he ask one of his many college chemistry professors about climate change, and that he might have missed a lecture or two. I wanted to suggest that the truly arrogant people are those who deny human made climate change, because they are the ones who think they know more than tens of thousands of climate change scientists, chemists, physicists, and biologists, plus the Department of Defense, which for decades has told us that human made climate change is the single greatest threat to American national security. Then, as was inevitable, he came out with the state of the art conservative method of denying climate change; the argument that the climate naturally changes on its own, that its going to change because it always has and always will, and that there is nothing we can do about it, because we aren't God. I didn't bother to mention that these tens of thousands of scientists had already thought of that, and that they factored natural climate change into their calculations, and that the mere fact that the climate changes naturally, which everyone already knows, doesn't mean that there is some kind of law preventing humans beings from impacting the climate. Forest fires happen naturally too, but people can pitch in and make their own. I knew the whole discussion was useless. So did he. He mentioned that since our discussion was not going to end well, he would just shake my hand and leave it at that. The thought occurred to me that instead of getting into an argument with a customer, a small business person was probably better off just letting all customers rant and rave and say whatever they wanted, without responding, and just sticking with furnaces, because, as they say, the customer is always right. But, hey, this guy was a conservative Christian, and most likely a Trump supporter, and thank God we didn't get into that. I have finally arrived at the awareness that my sixth grade teacher was right after all, back in 1967. Never discuss religion or politics. Why bother? My fellow progressive non christian wealth redistributing climate change believers and I already know that we agree with each other, and that we will never agree with the conservative christian capitalistic non redistribution of wealth climate change deniers, and that the great American polarized cultural war will continue, until one side destroys the other. We also know that those in the middle, the independent unthinking ones, really don't give a damn one way or another, and simply aren't interested in listening to us political animals tear each other apart. They'd rather talk about sports and the weather and use Facebook to share family vacation and cat pictures, and one can hardly blame them; they may be the smart ones after all.