Deep Impact

My wife attended the rally against the Keystone XL pipeline. I did not. She took public transportation. I did not. She gathered together with a like-minded group who are adamant about holding the president accountable for his words, these in particular from 2007: "We cannot afford more of the same timid politics when the future of our planet is at stake. Global warming is not a someday problem, it is now. We are already breaking records with the intensity of our storms, the number of forest fires, the periods of drought. By 2050 famine could force more than 250 million from their homes. . . . The polar ice caps are now melting faster than science had ever predicted. . . . This is not the future I want for my daughters. It's not the future any of us want for our children. And if we act now and we act boldly, it doesn't have to be." I did not. I did take heart in the mention of global warming in this year's State of the Union address: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.” And so did my wife.
It is science, after all, that put us where we are right now. The invention of the internal combustion engine and all those amazing factories we have been opening since the Industrial Revolution. As a race, we seem most content when we find something in the ground and then figure out a way to burn it. The problem is that all that creative fire makes creative smoke, and we never have found a way to re-purpose smoke.
I know the math. I understand the science. But I don't pretend to fathom the human mind. My son, who has been raised by a mother who speaks openly and candidly about three hundred and fifty parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere still gets all gishy when he hears a muscle car revving its engine. It is the planet that we are handing over to him that his mother wants to save. Where have we gone wrong? Why can't he feel the crisis? Why is his father sitting at home when thousands are taking to the streets to tell the world's leaders that we need to fix this now?
My answer? It's not a meteorite. If we could actually see the future, hurtling toward us, we might try and get out of the way, or attempt to deflect it. If Morgan Freeman were president, he'd know what to do. I suppose we could get Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg to get together to make some menacing public service announcements, and keep Bruce Willis on retainer. Just in case. Except that we don't want anybody to blow anything up. We want to try and keep things together. For future generations.