Year 3, Month 3, Day 30: Give You Everything I’ve Got For A Little Peace Of Mind…

In the Savannah Morning News, Barbara Kelly speaks to our condition:

2010 was the wettest year on record, and tied with 2005 as the hottest year since records have been kept. We have more extreme weather, and more freak weather as a result of climate change.

According to Amy Goodman (the host of democracynow.org), as she spoke from the U.N. Conference on Climate Change in Durban, Africa, recently, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are the only two countries who voted against the Green Climate Fund. This is especially strange because this fund was proposed by Hillary Clinton in 2010. My guess is that it is pretty obvious that such a proposal would never be able to make it through the current Congress. The corporate control by oil and gas would never let that happen.

Very busy today, so I just ground out a generic media-sucks-short-attention-spans-will-kill-us-all type letter and sent it off — March 24:

While the first amendment of the constitution guarantees freedom of speech, our present state of media-driven inattention and ignorance is surely not what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote of a “well-informed citizenry.” The helter-skelter 24-hour news cycle virtually guarantees inadequate coverage of any issues requiring analysis or prior background; if it can’t be summarized in a sound bite, you won’t find it on network news.

Nowhere is this more potentially damaging than in the profoundly troubling area of global heating. The multi-decade lag between human action and climatic reaction means that quick fixes are unavailable — but enduring fixes are too slow to merit prime-time slots.
At a time when we desperately need wisdom, our national discussion is dominated by foolish bluster. By framing environmental policy in purely political terms, our media abdicates its responsibility to the long-term health and prosperity of our nation and the world.

Warren Senders