So….a meteorologist in Iowa was essentially driven out of the state for daring to talk about climate change on the local news. He received death threats, ongoing harassment, and eventually a PTSD diagnosis. The meteorologist, Chris Gloniger, called it part of a ‘war against truth.’ A man eventually pleaded guilty to misdemeanor harassment and paid a whopping $105 fine.
Today, I’m going to focus on one aspect of the story that deserves major getting-pretty-fed-upness. To wit – the silence of the majority. From AP: “[Gloniger] realized that a small percentage of the people who reject climate change make up an overwhelming majority of the negative comments he has gotten.”
Gloniger goes on to say: “I know that now with the feedback that I’ve received after the fact, with hundreds of emails, dozens of handwritten letters,” he said of messages that have come from all over the state.
“At the end of the day, the people have been incredibly supportive — not just of me, but of the efforts that my station has made in covering climate.”
Further, from NPR.org: “The vast majority of Americans accept climate change as fact — a national study by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication released earlier this month found that 74% agree global warming is happening.
It’s just that those dismissive of climate change, Gloninger says, can be the loudest.
The thing is, people have been incredibly supportive – after the damage is done, and without the publicity that damage-doers get. It’s way past time for people who are not dismissive of climate change to be the loudest.
Time to Get Pretty Fed Up About Climate Change and Other Things and That Means Getting Loud
More broadly it’s way past time for normal people to be loudly normal. Social and other media perhaps despise normal people for being normal as they are not nearly as click-baity as abnormal weirdos (aka outrageous extremists). I get that.
But fuck ’em. Fuck both and social journalistic media! Get loud. Get mouthy! Be aggressively normal. Push back against the extremists and tell them to shut the fuck up and go away. Make ‘leave me alone weirdos and go back to the weirdo cesspool you crawled up from’ great again.
Regular people need to start saying ‘I’m tired of this shit, make it stop, or I’m going to keep yelling until it does stop.’
There are so many things for normal people to be pretty fed up about. It can be exhausting to think about doing something pretty fed up about each one. But that’s not as necessary, really, as getting the message out that normal, regular people are pretty damn fed up with wackos, weirdos, extremists, conspiracy theorists, climate change and truth deniers, and all manner of corruption and general godawfulness.
A simple message like ‘Stop with the war on truth, mofos!’ Or ‘stop with the harassment jerkwads!’ Or ‘Stop with the climate denialism, craven tools of the big money interests that have your pea-brain minds by the short hairs!’ You know, simple, polite messages like that.
Here’s why:
The World is Pretty Effed Up These Days
Yes, the world is pretty gosh-darn effed the fuck up these days. You know it; I know it, and somewhere around 7 billion of the world’s people know it, give or take. That leaves somewhere between 10 to 15% of the world’s human population blissfully unaware of the state of things, due mostly to infancy, childhood, or advanced age.
But things being effed all the way up is not unprecedented in the history of the world. In fact, pretty much as far as back as we can tell, things on planet earth have periodically been going pretty badly for much of the human population.
To give just one tiny example, about 70,000 years ago, it seems that just about every human on the planet died, and we all got stuck with the genes of the ones who didn’t. And don’t even get me started on all the poor hominids who didn’t make it (O Neanderthals, we hardly knew ye), or the Black Death, which killed, you know, a couple hundred million people, give or take, in the bracingly short span of about 7 years. If you think we’re in the end times now (and I hope you don’t), you haven’t read any history.
Speaking of end times, right around the time of Jesus, more or less, the hot rumor of the day was that the end was very very near. Unfortunately perhaps, it wasn’t, no matter how much people then (and now) wish it was.
Not that long ago, nuclear annihilation was the terror du mode, and before that Stalin and Mao were making seemingly semi-successful efforts to starve their entire populations, and before that World Wars I and II were fucking up the people of Europe. And before that, the people of the United States were busy killing each other in numbers not matched before or since in a bloody (and bloody awful) civil war. And on and on it goes, around the globe, back through history, one terrifying set of circumstances after another.
The point of this is not that history is really depressing, although it is. The point is that the people of the past, in spite of the apparent insanity and terrible judgment of their leaders, somehow figured out how to survive and make things better. Well, the ones who didn’t die during the catastrophes of their times, survived and figured out how to make things better.
They got pretty fed up with slavery and communism and imminent nuclear war and infectious diseases, with imperialism and colonialism and totalitarianism and world wars and starvation and whatever the fuck and they scratched and clawed and battled and cogitated and experimented and revolted and voted and protested and bit by bit said enough is enough, screw this shit, change something you motherfucking leaders with the terrible judgment, we’re not putting up with it anymore.
And somehow or another, they alleviated the problems of their day, not entirely, all the old evils still exist, but they beat back the terrible things and built and crafted better things and opened the door for newer more modern problems for the next generation to solve.
And even though the old evils still lurk, it was worth it. The job of any generation is to get pretty fed up (or even really fed up) with the problems of the day, to kick those problems in the teeth, to not put up with shit and to make things better. So that future generations have the luxury of confronting shiny new problems with shiny new ideas and tools. It’s a heart-warming concept really.
So join me won’t you in getting pretty fed up with the ills of the day, kicking them to the ground and stomping on them until they give up and cry uncle and we stand over them waving our righteous fists in triumph. Or something like that.
Get pretty fed up!
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Your point of view caught my eye and was very interesting. Thanks. I have a question for you.