Nothing seems normal

Enjoying the coolest summer of the rest of our lives?

The former guy with a long list of indictments, with more coming as early as next week, being the leading candidate to be his party’s nominee for the presidential election is not the only not-normal thing in life now.

In the America prior to 2015, such a candidate would not have even dared to utter anything in public leave along running—for the third time, may I remind you—for the most powerful position in the country.

His opponent, the sitting President, has a huge liability that could drag him down. The Department of Justice has named a Special Counsel to investigate the President’s son’s tax case, which could be related to his dependency on drugs. In the America prior to 2016, a candidate with such a huge liability would not have dared to comment on the state of politics, leave alone running to get re-elected to the most powerful position in the country.

Well, set aside politics, you say, because politics is always dirty.

Sure.

May I present to you the following news item?

A planned cage fight between tech leaders Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg could now take place in Italy, and have an ancient Rome theme.

When was the last time that two of the world’s richest men so badly wanted to get into a public fist fight? May I remind you that together they are worth more than $230 billion? And, did you know that the Z man “already has mixed martial arts (MMA) training and has recently won jiu-jitsu tournaments”?

You are still not convinced that we live in not-normal times? Ok then. Let me know what you are smoking right now, and I will get that from my nearest retailer!

There was a sudden and roaring firestorm in Hawaii that has caused extensive damage to life and property. Fires in Greece forced the evacuation of thousands of tourists.

Beijing, yes, the capital of China, was flooded by a tremendous amount of precipitation in two days. Rains and floods in Vermont made the news.

Phoenix—I don’t know whose idea it was to name a city in a desert after a mythological bird that rose from the ashes—roasted with a month of high temperature that exceeded 110 every single day, with night time “lows” in the low 90s.

Unlike me, most of you have real jobs and lives to live, which is why you might have missed this news: “In coastal Iran on Tuesday, the heat index leaped as high as 158 degrees (70 Celsius), a level so extreme that it can test the ability of humans to survive outside for more than a few hours.”

In recent days, Persian Gulf sea surface temperatures have risen as high as 97.6 degrees (36.4 Celsius), the highest in 20 years of satellite data at this time of year. The hot tub-like waters are similar to those recently observed near the Florida Keys as oceans worldwide set records for warmth.

What? You have stopped smoking whatever it was and are now paying attention?

A politician, a dull and boring policy wonk, the kind that always draws my attention, who lost the presidential election after the US Supreme Court selected the President, would have plenty to say about all these. I am surprised, but not really surprised, that we do not hear a lot from him.

In the US, until the former guy came along, we led a life with an understanding that one-term Presidents and those who lost the presidential elections would walk away from the spotlight and teach and write books or whatever. Sure, historians will point to examples from the past about candidates who came back like the phoenix—the bird that is—but that is history. I mean, did you ever wonder what Michael Dukakis did after he lost to George H. W. Bush?

So, who cares about Al Gore, right?

Some of us do.

The NY Times reported on a conversation with Gore:

We can’t always say that a specific weather event was caused by climate change, but it is making certain extremes more likely. And this summer, the extreme weather chaos that Gore predicted in “An Inconvenient Truth” seems to have arrived all at once.

“Every night on the TV news is like taking a nature hike through the Book of Revelation,” Gore said.

But, what if “a nature hike through the Book of Revelation” is what some would like to happen as soon as possible?

The latest installment of “Enlighten Me” that Rachel Martin has been serving on NPR featured a Canadian with an interesting background:

[Patty] Krawec's mom's side of her family is German and Ukrainian. They migrated to the Niagara region in Canada in the early 1950s, and Krawec was raised in a white evangelical Christian church, while her father's family is Indigenous, from the Ojibwe people.

The conversation is thoughtful and I urge you to listen to it in full. In the context of this post, take a look at this excerpt:

Martin: You write in your book, and this really grabbed me, that Christians are "unmoored, landless people." Can you say more about that?

Krawec: Yeah. Christians have this focus on the afterlife and getting there, and they're not thinking about the impacts on the world around them which disconnects them from land and from the trees and from the water. It means it doesn't matter how we treat those things because they're just there for us to use and we will use something else when that's used up.

And then this rapture theology that I grew up with, that Christians are all going to be raptured out of here, it's their get out of jail free card in the end times. That's even more disconnection from this world. Why should we care if it's just all gonna get flattened anyway?

So, while Gore worries that the events are like those in the Holy Book, Krawec argues that the Christian focus on afterlife disconnects them from the events that worries people like Gore, me, and others.

Krawec adds: “Whereas the Anishinaabe and Ojibwe belief system is you have to care. Yes, we're passing through this world, there is an afterlife, but this world matters.”

Of course, Krawec’s is a sweeping generalization. There are Christians in plenty who worry about the upsetting developments in politics and climate. But, her point should also make us worry that a significant number of fellow Americans, who number in tens of millions, wouldn’t care about these issues that are of importance to us because they are so focused on the afterlife with god and angels.

In his presentations on climate change, Al Gore often referred to the hockey-stick upturn in the graph of global surface temperature. I wonder where the heat—political and climate—during this summer of 2023 will take us.