Feeling helpless about what is going on in the world is something that I know intimately. Four of the five adult children and four of the five grandchildren live in the States far away from us and we must trust them and the Divine that they will be safe.
Last week one son and daughter-in-law were facing Hurricane Laura and Marco in Houston while another son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren were carefully watching the fires in Sonoma County. A third son was looking for an apartment he and his love could afford since he has been unemployed due to COVID-19, while our daughter and two more grandchildren are figuring out home-schooling while working, since school openings are tenuous at best.
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| 2020-08 Battling California fires - photo Shutterstock licensed |
Increases in hurricanes, droughts/fires, and pandemics are all a direct result of climate change. Tornados are becoming bigger and fiercer and the derecho in Iowa was something we had never heard of in our lives, all because of climate change.
Greenland lost so much of its ice shelf to the Atlantic
Ocean, even if temperatures were to stop rising but hold steady it cannot
recover. In one 24-hour period July 30
and 31st an estimated 12 billion tons of ice fell into the ocean. Approximately a week later the last Canadian
ice shelf the size of Manhattan fell into the ocean. This much fresh water will affect the
salinity of the ocean. Our oceans and
seas control most weather patterns and with climate change their waters and
life forms are changing and not to the good for humanity’s survival.
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| Marjorie Glacier meltdown - photo Shutterstock licensed |
Helplessness overpowers me at times. My small actions do little to address climate change. In The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallis-Wells, he says one of the most important things we can do to slow climate change is to vote for leaders who will make climate change their number one priority.
We have to use Greta Thunberg (a 17-year old) as an example how to not let helplessness overpower us, but we instead overpower helplessness by loudly, continually, and forcibly demanding, coercing and even strong-arming government leaders and stockholders and CEOs to sit their butts down and put into place laws, regulations, and severe penalties that work on this problem.
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| Greta Thunberg - photo Shutterstock licensed |
We must take our blinders off. We must act.
We must vote. We must yell. We must resist. There is no more time to dawdle.
-Kathleen
