That blindfolded, wooden dummy feeling

When events in the news are particularly dire (as they have been lately), I sometimes do the escapist mental act of flashing forward into the future thirty years or fifty years or even a hundred. That last one is certainly beyond the scope of my time on earth, but regardless, what happens when I do this mental exercise is it jars me out of current societal awfulness & reminds me that there is an ongoing existential crisis across the planet courtesy of climate change. While this doesn't make me feel 'better', it does snap me out of feeling entirely surrounded by that wooden dummy mode I'm seeing many leaders & governments replaying.

I was tuning out the bizarre circus of the House Republicans and their weeks-long struggle to find someone extreme enough for their far-right members to align behind. Instead, I watched how the horrible attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas have led to the far-right Israeli government (which I wrote about previously here) pummeling the closed-off Gaza Strip for weeks, brutally ending thousands of Palestinian lives even while hundreds of their hostages are still being held. My attention came back to the Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives when they finally found their hero: a passionate climate denier & insurrection supporter. So, in the U.S., the nonsense campaign of resistance that many Republicans still wage against climate action will continue; while in the Middle East, which is warming twice as quickly as most places, leaders push for a war that could rage on and on, threatening regional climate actions as millions in Gaza are having their basic infrastructure dismantled.

Squooshing all of that down to one paragraph does kind of show me how mentally squeezed these situations have been making me feel. Yet, even when it is not in the news, I know that climate change is still happening, regardless of how much it is dismissed or made invisible by extreme human politics.