Are we nuts?

Yes, negotiating the highs and lows of observing my fellow human beings is not without its risks. Sooner or later, though, all of us observers ask ourselves the very same question: "Are we nuts?" Really, at some point we all start asking ourselves if we humans are mentally unbalanced, or worse.

Think about it:

• we don't listen to reason
• we ignore facts we don't like
• ideology substitutes for thought more often than not
• we question as good as nothing
• we act against our own best interests, and
• when we react, it is usually violently

Those aren't the signs of a happy, healthy individual. It's even worse when birds of a feather start flocking together. It too often ends up looking like a murder of crows, not a gaggle of geese.

To top it all off, as a species it is starting to become clear that we're suicidal as well. You don't think so? What do you call what we are doing to the environment. Denying global warming doesn't make it go away. Merely saying the oceans are really big does reduce the rate of acidification. Declaring bankruptcy doesn't make the water in West Virginia safe. On a global scale, Bill McKibben's 2012 Rolling Stone article, "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math", explains the three numbers spelling our doom in a way that any reasonable layperson could understand: We can't afford a 2^o C increase in the Earth's temperature (as was agreed to in Copenhagen in 2009), but we're already way ahead of schedule (the temperature has gone up 0.8^o C since then); it is clear that the atmosphere can take - best-case scenario - only 565 gigatons more of CO₂ by 2050 to stay under the two-degree mark, but we're already three-quarters of the way there already. The Fossil-Fuel Masters of Disaster, though, have 2,795 gigatons of CO₂ identified in current reserves, and they're doing all they can to find even more. We may not be able to handle a fifth of that, but they're looking for more. C'mon folks, their profits are our deaths. It is really that simple.

America, of course, was long the world's top polluter, but since they've outsourced most of their manufacturing to China, the Chinese have taken over the bad-boy role. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter who is the worst in the end, what does matter is what, if anything, any of us plan to do about it. The result of my observations is we're not going to do a damn thing. We're deluded enough to think this is all someone else's problem. To make matters worse, Congress, for example, has single-digit approval ratings, but 75% of the bozos there are going to get re-elected next time around. So much for democracy, eh? (And, by the way, if you think it is substantially different elsewhere, you're mistaken. It's not.)

No, I don't think it's all that unjustified to wonder about humanity's sanity. I just wish I knew how to make sense to crazy people.