It's the whether

Yesterday was Kansas’ birthday.
Kansas – the snow globe state.
Don’t like what you see,
shake it, flip it upside down.
The day before it was 74,
today it’s freezing and dropping,
snow on the ground this morning,
sunshine expected by afternoon.
But at least it was windy all three days.

Now Kansas has always had erratic weather
It’s normal to be abnormal.
But now, even the natives like me,
are getting restless.
If it’s still January,
and if the calendar is telling the truth,
and we are inclined to doubt things
not specified in the Bible,
then what will it be like in August?

While it’s true,
that drought isn’t new,
it hasn't rained like it should
for quite some time,
and we grow wheat and other things
that become food here in Kansas.

On the bright side,
or the dim,
most of us here in Kansas,
like people all over, really,
but perhaps more so here,
believe what we want to believe.

If we want to believe we’ll go to heaven
when we die, we do.
If we don’t want to believe our great uncle,
to the power of twenty or forty or whatever,
was not a monkey, we don’t.
And when it comes to the climate changing,
more than we’d like it to,
I mean more than we’re used to,
I mean more than we used to joke about it
going from April Fool’s Day weather one day back to January the next,
slip sliding to North Dakota before heading back to Kansas …
Well, you get my freezing drizzle.

I don’t mind the variability in the weather,
in fact I sort of prefer it, within reason.
I have a problem with the inconsistency
in reasoning.

Believing in things, or not, that haven’t, probably can’t be,
established, is one thing.
I will find out, I suppose,
or not, when I die.

Not that I like that idea very much,
but it seems pretty well established that everyone,
even Kansans, die.
Of course taxes for education,
and other normally responsible government functions,
more than half of us don’t seem to believe in anymore.

I think it has to do with bundling, like with your cable bill,
and perhaps its true that watching too much TV will rot
your brain:
God and Not-evolution, and Not-abortion,
and Not-taxes, and Not-listening to anyone
who sounds like they have the wrong kind of education -
all get bundled together,
and people simply,
and I mean, without thinking about it very much,
go to one party or the other.

And I don’t know that either party
has a monopoly on all the good ideas
or right thinking in general,
although, like most people, I like to believe that
I am the exception, that I’m not overly swayed by my peers,
I just prefer to hang around with people who think and believe
the way I do.

But about the weather, which used to be a safe subject to talk about,
what do you think?
I really don’t want to believe it will possibly get as crazy as some scientists,
who have spent their lives either becoming more informed or more misinformed,
not like the rest of us, more or less haphazardly, but with observable and repeatable methods, which they call science, and significant deliberation, have speculated.

But who can follow all of that? Besides, nobody really knows the future. Not even farmers know if their wheat will make a crop this year.

As for the sun coming up in the morning - which that old shake-n-bake Copernicus may have established to his own satisfaction a few hundred years ago isn’t quite so, but not even a science-lover like me will say: well, the spherical Earth will rotate on its axis so that the state of Kansas is once again in a direct line to receive the sun’s rays.

I’d like to believe that most of us are not stupid, but almost all of us are indeed slow – perhaps as slow as a lumbering brontosaurus - to believe things we’d rather not believe.

What reason have we given ourselves as a species that we will act before the consequences of bad thinking become evident? Lincoln freed the slaves. LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. And, yes, an African-American is now president. But Martin Luther King Jr’s. dream is still merely a dream for many. And all of this was accomplished, such as it is, with much kicking and screaming and dragging of feet by people who didn’t believe in equality, or at least not enough to do something about it, or at the very least,  to just get out of the way.

So about the weather – this climate change thing? Are we going to keep flipping the coin, flipping the globe, and wait and see? The scientists are putting the odds at about 97 to 3 that not making some significant changes will result in changes for the planet that human beings won’t be happy about.

Many of the more unpleasant, and speculative, changes - in the sense that nobody can precisely predict the weather from one day to next fifty years from now – are indeed ahead of us. In Kansas, it’s something of a challenge to call the weather in real time. So I suppose, many of us will be somewhere over the rainbow by whenever.

But are you kids good with that? With this democracy game, the way it’s being played, old and dying people are at the table. But then, again, I’ve seen some of you whippersnappers doing your skateboarding things without a helmet or driving while texting.

What are the chances enough of us will think carefully and make up our minds and vote to do something that might do something about this weather? My unscientific prediction for the human species doing the right thing is about 97 to 3, against.

Game’s not over yet.