True Colors

L

et’s do some living… after we die.

I borrowed that line from a song. Maybe you know it. I do. But, I’m not talking. But, I will talk about 2022.

I’ve talked to some of you here. I’ve talked to some of you via Zoom, email, text, various private messaging methods and on the phone. We are all worried about the coming year.

We’ve been through almost two years of the pandemic. We’ve been scared, we’ve been angry and sad. Now, I believe we are mostly just tired. We are not sure of how much more we can take.

Bill Gates wrote a piece about why we should be optimistic in 2022. We’ll see because it’s not just the pandemic we have on our minds.

There’s other issues to worry about, not the least of them is climate change. I just read a long piece written for The National Geographic by an author whose job used to be to observe the Arctic. He wrote a very well received book about it.

He and his son paddled through the area a few months ago. The drastic changes scared him. There was no place the couldn’t paddle through. Ice had melted. Areas that had been deep permafrost now have none. The deep frozen plants looked like a bunch of defrosted spinach. His words, not mine. Worse, the temperature was in the 90s. They had to use bug spray to ward off the mosquitoes. It was hot enough at night that they couldn’t sleep.

This is just a peak at what we can expect. I’ve lived through two 100 year hurricanes in 16 years. New York City gets flooded with any major storm. People living in basement apartments drown in their sleep. California and the west burns every year wether it needs to or not. Friends joke about going to the beach for Christmas. Big deal. We can do that down here too. The difference is that it is supposed to be warm down here.

The answers are well above my pay grade, but the appear to be above the pay grades of the people that we elect to get us out of this mess. Don’t even get me started on science skeptics. Or, the people who got their medical degree from the University of Facebook.

So.

The picture is my well intentioned Attempt to create art that talks about our current place in the cosmos. Maybe it works. What do y’all think?