Today on the Quilt Art list, the hot (no pun intended) topic was the weather – world wide. Someone said Gore was right. Then someone talked about making a quilt about global warming and talked very seriously about this problem. Then someone called those who are worried about the environment – Gorebots.

That made me mad. first of all a comment like that just ends any intelligent discussion. There are, by many estimates, about 20 – 30 % of the population of the US who will follow the Republican Party line no matter what. They will not listen, they will not discuss – they are Bushbots!! They are not patriots because they don’t really care about the welfare of this nation or the people who live here. They are party loyalists. Party loyalists are the precursor to fascism. More on my fear of that in another rant.

Now back to the environment. I found this article, Chicken Little was right; Al Gore, too by Alan W. Scarth here. In it he says:

British scientist James Lovelock offered us a first-edition manual in 1979, called Gaia,
his name for the planet’s operating system, after the immeasurably
fecund Greek goddess. He warned us that if we overloaded the operating
system with carbon, it would break down. We ignored him. Our planet
seemed to be running well enough, and we were more interested in his
former specialty, exploring the possibility of life on Mars. The
possibility of diminished human life on Earth seemed a stretch.

Now, at 86 and with his Gaia system recognized by scientists
worldwide, Lovelock — named last year by Prospect magazine as among
the world’s top 100 global public intellectuals — offers us an updated
work, which he calls The Revenge of Gaia. As the title
suggests, his thesis is that despite his warnings, we have gone and
done it: We have overloaded the system with atmospheric carbon, and we
are at the point of irreversible breakdown; the evidence of hurricanes,
melting ice and increasing drought is all around us.

This is only one of many scientists who have researched this topic. They are not right or left – they are looking at facts. I, for one, am scared. I thought this might happen some time in the future and now it looks like I will live to witness the mess we are making of this planet.

The idiots running this country are too busy taking care of their rich buddies and waging an illegal war to pay attention to the important things.

I am currently reading Anne Lamott’s Plan B Further Thoughts on Faith. Oh my goodness, I love her writing. It is at times poetic and at times like a knife cutting through the crap. These essays were started after Bush was elected, and she says this to which I can so relate.

Everyone I know has been devastated by Bush’s presidency and, in particular, our country’s heroic military activities overseas. I can usually manage a crabby hope that there is meaning in mess and pain, that more will be revealed, and that truth and beauty will somehow win out in the end. So much had been stolen from us by Bush, from the very beginning of his reign, and especially since he went to war in Iraq. I wake up some mornings pinned to the bed by centrifugal sadness and frustration.

Hadn’t the men in the White House ever heard of the word karma? They lied their way into taking our country to war, crossing another country’s borders with ferocious military might, trying to impose our form of government on a sovereign nation, without any international agreement or legal justification and set about killing the desperately poor on behalf of the obscenely rich. Then we’re instructed, like naughty teenagers to  refrain from saying that it was an immoral war that set a disastrous precedent ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù because to do so is to offer aid and comfort to the enemy.

She goes on to talk about how do we get through our days with this mess hanging over us. She gets advice from a Jesuit priest: "Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe." A kind of mediation as we wander through the current desert.

I must give her credit for taking part in protests. And as a product of the 60’s, I’d sure love to see some mass protests again. I am sad that the younger generation seems so apathetic. And I have babbled on for long enough.