Kudos, respect, and thanks to Chuck Todd and NBC for today’s extraordinary edition of Meet The Press. The entire hour was dedicated to discussions of critical climate issues and the onrushing impacts of a warming earth. In a ground-breaking departure, MTP’s panel consisted entirely of scientists and climate experts—climate-change deniers were not invited. “We’re not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not,” Todd said.
“We’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it. The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a major cause, period.” – Chuck Todd, Meet The Press
This stance from the major media is long overdue, and it’s even (dare I say it?) a little encouraging. Most Americans, in line with the vast majority of scientists, are convinced that anthropogenic climate change is both a reality, and an existential threat to our species. The deniers, a vocal minority, tend to be religious fundamentalists, conservative politicians, shills for the fossil-fuel industries, or some bastardized combo of the three. Their arguments are contrived, self-serving, and easily collapsible. Yet the media has all too often given them a platform, whenever the subject is discussed, apparently in the interests of some wobbly idea of editorial balance.
This morning, Chuck Todd said fuck all that.
Henceforth, let that be so. We’ve got work to do, people. We have a planet to save. We haven’t the time or bandwidth to entertain the fiddling of these latter-day Neros. Sure, some of them are in power, and more’s the pity…but a countervailing powerbase is on the rise. There’s an understanding now, among smart people who not only understand the problem but also have some pretty good ideas for coming to terms with it, that we should, can, and will just step around the deniers, and get cracking on this thing without and in spite of them.
This will be the final dispatch of 2018 for this intrepid font of Deconstruction. It’s been comin at ya more or less weekly (probably mostly less, but hey) since early 2011. Under the admittedly amorphous rubric of ‘culture critique, current events, and commentary,’ we’ve taken license to poke around a gamut of subjects—art, culture, politics—and more often than not a frisson of pessimism has tended to creep in. Ends-of-years, particularly since that chancre-sore of an election in 2016, have been especially glum in this regard.
But in the words I insist on attributing to Chuck Todd, fuck all that. I’m not promising unrelenting cheer from here on (in fact I’m pretty sure we can rule that out), but I can at least strive to ring out 2018, and welcome 2019, with as positive a mindset as possible. I hope you can too.
Just cleave to that momentum, that driving will to leverage good thoughts and good deeds, and turn them into the progress we need going forward. Know there are millions, maybe billions, of others just like you, who are toiling to make this world better, fairer, more welcoming and accepting for us all.
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” – Juliana of Norwich
Happy New Year 2019 to you and yours, and do not fear. We got this.
