Climate Change Is a Euphemism
I read another sad tale of how our planet is bad for business today, in the most recent headline about how Trump, Etc. are trying to push an arctic drilling plan by making grand speeches that leave out inconvenient details.
Having recently viewed a true and depressing version of the 1990s, Vice, in which I was forced to relive the awful politics of my twenties, I see how little has changed. Power-hungry men, nearly all white, don’t want us — the human race — to interfere with their regular infusion of fat stacks that make the perfect fuel for, you guess it, amassing fatter stacks.
Rinse, repeat and use the excess green paper to light the world on fire.
According to Vice,a story that had little factual data to work with regarding who Dick Cheney is, the filmmakers noted that is was Cheney who shifted the rhetoric from “global warming” to “climate change.” In a brief aside and a subtle remark, Vice turned the screw to open up the audience’s eyes to the scope of the cynicism from the Bush, Jr. years, and perhaps, too, hit us over our collective skulls.
Or perhaps his character and specific genius to obfuscate makes no difference, because we keep recycling Cheneys within the halls of power.
Since the current crop of US government power mongers, and in the spirit of reality why not call them what they are, have their hands tied by the golden chains of corporate puppet-masters, precise terminology seems beside the point.
Yet the term climate change is too similar to “weather changes,” and too familiar, almost comfortable.
Trump Voters Know Climate Change
At this stage, even Midwestern farmers who voted for Trump are beginning to acknowledge their shared, experiential understanding that the climate is changing on their farms, in their fields, by their rivers and in their lives.
“Oh yeah, you know climate change or: what’s causing all the floods/fires/storms/politics.”
It’s a pain in the you-know-what, but it’s just part of life. It’s the “new normal.”
When we call it by its more accurate name, global warming, we have a better chance of acknowledging its deathly progression. The “new normal” means that normality has been eviscerated. Change is part of life, but so are regular seasons.
Even the word “warming” is misleading. But our human language requires metaphor, idiom and euphemism. We need language to sustain hope, to keep this escalating existential threat, if not solvable at least tepid. Without hope, we cannot countermand it.
Climate change is a meaningless term, and it should be put back into its little box, along with “hopes and prayers.”
The global warming, like a fever, won’t stop. But since the climate is always changing, the euphemistic “climate change” keeps its brilliant shine and perpetual spin.
The word climate goes way beyond the seasons and the known catastrophes we’ve weathered as a species. The word “climate” represents context. Of course, the context shifts and that is what makes our lives interesting and vibrant. The climate is always in flux, always has been, and, anyway, a changing climate could be good for all those unfortunate northerners (we are back to the climate involving temperatures now, keep up).
Those midwesterners may be hardy and they may not complain, but plenty of Minnesotans don’t like long, dreary winters, either. So change can be good, right? Isn’t greed good? Didn’t we make greed good a few years before we elected Cheney, Etc. back in the 1990s?
The devil is in the details. The climate hasn’t “always changed” but has changed in eons past, sometimes dramatically, sometimes more quickly. The climate has never changed this fast, this precipitously, this way.
I won’t pretend this short piece has much depth; there is no need to argue that the planet is in peril because the science is overwhelming. My headline says it all.
But keep reading, because you can start speaking the truth.
I just want us — the 99% who want the basics like food, water, shelter and children — to start calling it for what it is, and keeping those who are now throwing their hats into the ring honest about this threat to our lives, and more tangibly to the lives of our children. Because we won’t get anywhere trading inaccuracies and sugarcoating what is a real-time global catastrophe.
In the spirit of zombie world-leaders everywhere and their puppet-masters, their billionaire dealers, let’s bring global warming back from the dead.
Pro-Planet, Pro-Life, Pro-Reality
In case you are wondering if our US leadership — or George W. Bush — were “that bad” you need only look at the origin of our government’s lies about global warming, and the fact the Trump, Etc. refuses to say it, even euphemistically.
In case you are wondering whether you should participate in the election process by voting (you should), look for a winner with a global warming plan. If he — and it’s always a he because, remember, we are in crisis and don’t have time now to repeat the Hillary debacle — calls it by its true name, pay attention.
The candidates who refuse to address global warming are lying to you.
The ones who can’t even speak its euphemism are shouting loud and clear.
