Sinking Beneath the Sea, and Rising Into Heaven

CHARMING CHARLESTON, South Carolina, like the rest of the world's coastal cities, is sinking, as the sea level rises, globally. The Atlantic ocean is flooding the land with ever greater frequency. Compounding this is that much of the city is built on filled marshland, sacrament of greed, and demand for oceanfront land. Homeowners of lovely Victorian mansions are resorting to sandbags and stilts. Selling is not an option; there is no market for doomed merchandise and submerged real estate. Meanwhile, in the American south, in mid February, mosquitoes are abundant, huge and healthy, fat and sassy, egged on by mild winters. Jonquils, crocuses, and Iris, likewise confused but emboldened, are breeding lilacs out of the dead land with spring rain, already six inches tall, challenging possible teenaged April temperatures. Here in the south Earth has not been covered in forgetful snow for five years, a record unequaled, but likely to be soon broken. Fifty years ago a short drive along any American highway yielded a windshield covered with smashed insect bodies. Our cliched rejoinder was: "That's me. all over!". Now, hardly anyone needs bother with a windshield wash. Enter the self proclaimed self righteous sellers of salvation, the conservative evangelical Christian community, for whom dire warnings of imminent climate collapse and doom are but an inconvenient noise of the liberal mainstream media; those people are destined for hell, anyway. The Trumper Limbaugh loving religious right has more transcendent concerns; they await, patiently but eagerly, the forever imminent re-arrival of a sword wielding, thunderous, vengeful God from the sky, a deity which in more proactive times of ancient yore and lore wiped away lives by the fifty thousand and seventy, for indiscretions involving taking a peek inside an ornate box, made to exact specification, at the most important document on earth: the law of God, sacred, and for some reason, hidden by divine edict. At the end of the day, as they tritely sa, we all get what we most cherish: the saved elect get raptured into heaven one step ahead of the climatic apocalypse, and the rest of us get to stay and, probably in vain, try to clean up the mess, comforted only by the pleasant relief which will surely descend upon the sane by the sudden, and pleasant respite from those who ascended, kindly leaving us the hell alone.