Author: Yennaedo Balloo
Like many people, I’m subject to the habitual desire to scare myself silly. Blame it on the music, the video games, movies I watched as a child or just my personality, but I am simply not scared by Hollywood’s attempts to produce fantastic stories of demons, monsters, evil and gore (I cheered for Hannibal throughout the saga, laughed throughout The Hills Have Eyes, and plan on doing the same through the sequel).
Whenever I need to get my dose of fear I’m more prone to watching the History, Discovery or National Geographic Channels. The only things capable of frightening me are real events and people. I’ve always found the movies with more realistic situations infinitely more capable of frightening than anything else. The truth is that a documentary on the Holocaust is more likely to result in a sleepless night than any of The Nightmare on Elm Street movies ever managed to.
God bless Jetblue for having DirecTV, because on my way back to L.A. I was able to take in a bit of what seemed to be an “Earth Is So Screwed” marathon that hop-scotched over three channels in what must have been synchronized programming. I was left for the remainder of my flight in a numb sort of fright that bordered on panic such that I nearly choked on my complimentary chips when my neighbor asked to get by for the lavatory.
What truly cemented the fright was an hour-long special on the top ten ways that human life on Earth could conceivably end, with experts in relevant fields to ground the claims. The number one reason continued to ebb and flow in and out of the subsequent shows I watched for the rest of the flight: global warming, now embraced with the ever more terrifying moniker of climate change.
I say “embraced” because it is no longer a lingering idea being muttered with little grounding. It is, according to the data and the experience of everyone alive and doing research over the past ten years, very real. The effects that were previously only perceived as a rise in temperature have now led to other consequences because of our slow willingness to accept even that there is a problem. Now a total climate change is affecting the world over. Storms are changing their formerly traditional patterns and becoming more severe. Melting ice caps could sink major cities and whole nations within just half a century while we’re trying to come up with plans and methods of containment, much less reverse the damage already incurred.
“We need to reduce greenhouse gases” is a phrase regularly tossed around. California residents and people from Oregon (particularly Portland) should be familiar with such motions towards environmental regression, as these two areas have made the most notable changes over past years. Al Gore’s work being taken into consideration, and my desire to avoid the obvious attacks on the current administration’s prioritizing war over the world for which we fight, I still have to ask with handfuls of my torn out hair: “Just what the hell are we doing?”
We seem to be sitting in a classroom without our homework, with no idea what the assignment was, waiting for the teacher to catch us for our delinquency and to fail the test at the end of the period. While it’s said over and over again that we can move to reduce our output of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, can we count on mere reductions to do any good this late in the game? How likely is it that the United States can reduce its emissions enough, and not just industrially, but as a society dependent on automobiles and gluttonous for electricity?
It’s a constant sign of the times that we live in: we’ve become too large for our own good and cannot be moved to do anything truly revolutionary unless we have the guise of a cause that is profitable for the people funding the ad campaign for it. I’m not being pessimistic, but for all the news I have heard saying that we’re plummeting to our own doom, I’ve yet to hear any of the real possibility that we can be saved. Despite all of the mounting data, I also see nowhere near enough fear to move us, which is a shame, because I always hoped I’d be able to visit Amsterdam.
Yennaedo is a sophomore ECLS major and Opinions Co-Editor for the Weekly. He can be reached at yballoo@oxy.edu.
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