A-CHOO

I’m a little behind on my blogging, but I have a great excuse. I have a cold.

Now, at this time of year, most of the world gets a cold. But, this is the first time I haven’t slugged out to the office and worked through it, sneezing and coughing. It’s a good thing that few people were around me, and  I could do most of my work on the phone.

So, I have taken my first chance in decades to miss a deadline, although admittedly it was a self-imposed one. I just waited for other things to fill my life, and - surprise - I actually learned something important. Something about politics.

I got the chance to see the world the way other people do, people who do not live and breathe politics, who follow every word of every candidate and who know most of the details about most of the issues.

And, while the world according to politics flirted with nuclear war, horrible war crimes, corruption in high places, conflicting signals on the plans of our President and of the GOP, I listened to all this the same way that real people do, and it explained a lot.

Do you know what I heard inside my cold-fogged head? Blah, blah, blah.

Everybody was saying the same things they said the day before. Democrats. Republicans. Commentators. The only thing that seemed to change was the amount of money paid to women who had sued Bill O’Reilly over alleged sexual harassment and the number of sponsors dropping his show.

And that’s where I learned something. Very little matters until it actually happens. That;s why its so hard for so many people to take global warming seriously. It hasn’t happened in a way that they can recognize.

Many of the people who live on the shore in New York and North Carolina and Florida don’t think of sea level rising as an abstract concept, not when they see some houses falling into the sea and others being moved away from the water.

People who live in tornado alley, and who have been seeing more and bigger storms every year for a decade, are starting to think that hotter days and nights means more energy in the air, and that  means more tornados.

And, some of the people who have always denied that man-made changes can impact the weather are starting to notice that while climate change has been around for centuries, there are a lot more people on the planet now doing a lot more things and putting a heck of a lot more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

Would you believe that, once, Californians didn’t know what smog was?

So, as i am starting to feel better, I am becoming a little more understanding of the human condition, and will doubtless be more tolerant about what people say, even what politicians say.

Yes, it will take a real outrage to set me off again.

Anyone want to bet how long it takes to happen?