What Will It Take to Get Humans to Wake Up?
Do We Need A Catastrophe?
So, I woke up yesterday morning to the following article:
Federal officials sounding an alarm, a call for action.
Not some left-wing homegrown protest group. Nope! The alarm comes from federal officials literally pleading with people to start doing something before it’s too late.
The outlook is grim for the Colorado River.
But it’s even grimmer for the people living in seven states who depend on the water this river supplies. As shhhhhh — climate change — continues to wreak havoc upon the west with unending drought, nobody seems to be able to do anything.
Ugh!
It’s as though we vacillate between being paralyzed from the realization of what’s happening to wishful thinking and denial. One minute we’re banging our fists on the wall and the next minute we’re off to Disney World to have the best day ever.
Nothing sticks.
Nothing seems to be enough to give us a collective snap-out-of-it.
Nothing produces a vision or a plan of action.
We talk from time to time. The words are meant to inspire, but they can’t hold our attention long enough to take the next step.
We love our lives of convenience and waste.
We’re living on borrowed money and borrowed time. It’s addictive and lends itself to something equivalent to putting our fingers in our ears, squeezing our eyes tight shut, and chanting nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.
We really don’t want to know.
This kind of inaction is now status quo. It’s the standard reaction for almost all problems we face today.
And I might add a sharp no to the question posed in the subtitle to this article. Do we need another catastrophe? Another catastrophe won’t be enough. We’ve had one unprecedented catastrophe after another for quite some time now and they’re on the increase. Still no response that produces collective action.
As the above article clearly states:
“Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the nation’s two largest reservoirs, are now nearly three-fourths empty, and water levels are set to continue dropping. The latest government estimates show there is a risk that Lake Mead could reach “dead pool” levels in 2025, at which point the river would no longer flow past Hoover Dam, cutting off water for California, Arizona and Mexico.
That grim scenario has given urgency to the search for solutions, as officials from states, water agencies, tribes and the federal government consider options for water cutbacks on a scale never seen before.”
The catastrophe is here.
It’s not happening a hundred years from now. But will we deal with it? And if a plan is developed will the American people support putting it into action. Is there enough collective will to make a difference or are we so spoiled and short sighted that we’ll go down with the ship before we’ll act.
I wonder. I truly wonder.
And you know as well as I do that even if a plan is devised there will be an onslaught of misinformation, calls to protect liberty and freedom, angry men with guns popping up everywhere, and politicians politicizing any attempt to address the problem. That’s where we’re at, folks. We can’t seem to fix things anymore. When it’s too late, we’ll point fingers at everyone else but ourselves.
Because denial isn’t just a river in Egypt. It’s a river in America that we squander without giving it so much as a second thought.
Teresa is an author, world citizen, and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
