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December 7, 2007
The Best Time to Call a Do-Over
I’ve been trying to figure out why I was so very upset by JGW's story about his friend’s threatened suicide--not that I think I had the wrong response; quite the contrary. I was just a bit surprised by the intensity of my reaction. It’s true that I’m often a big cry baby and that religious despair in particular upsets me, but I’m not always so tender-hearted that I can’t stop weeping over the suffering of some unnamed stranger. (Though I admit it has happened before. And something else that made me cry today is this, on MohoHawaii.) I know part of it is that I’m deeply worried about my friend R and her husband (as I mentioned yesterday, a tree fell on him while he was working in the woods around their house), who has been sedated into oblivion since Saturday (and will be for weeks to come), and who had spinal surgery yesterday so doctors could determine the extent of and hopefully repair his injuries. But I’ve also just been feeling more theologically and apocalyptically vulnerable lately, because I recently witnessed one of the signs of the end of days: my father acknowledged the reality of global warming.
When I was home for Thanksgiving we were talking about how ridiculously hot it was in Mesa this past year, where one of my sisters lives--it was 90 F on Halloween, and 80 as the end of November neared. “Well, it’s just gonna get hotter,” Dad said. “What with global warming, plus all those air conditioners running night and day, even in winter, and all that asphalt and concrete to soak up the heat and keep it hot all night.”
I stared at him. He’s right, of course, but it’s precisely the kind of statement he dismissed when I made it seven or eight years ago.
I have always hated the story of Noah and the Ark--really, really hated it. I was very young--three or four or so--when I first heard it via flannel board in junior Sunday school, and the pictures of all these normal looking people lying around dead everywhere while Noah rode off in his ark absolutely horrified me. God had KILLED them? Killed ALL of them? Because they’d done something BAD? What on earth could they have done that was so awful that god, who supposedly loved everyone, would kill everyone? Did they bonk their baby sister on the head with a wiffle ball bat? Wet their best frilly panties just before Church? Spill a whole bowl of Count Chocula on the living room rug?
I wasn’t one of those little kids who was crazy about animals and wanted to be a veterinarian. Animals were just fine, sort of, as long as they didn’t eat you or bite you or charge you or jump on you or knock you down or lick you or give you ringworm or fleas or any sort of parasite or cooties or germs. (I was one of those kids who liked being clean.) But at some point in adulthood I started to like animals, and I started to feel really AWFUL about the ways we hurt and hunt and kill them. In particular I started to feel bad about the way we treat monkeys. I am really bothered by the fact that so few monkeys and great apes exist today, that we’ve hunted them and destroyed their habitats and done experiments on them or made them into pets until they’re on the brink of extinction. I don’t want to hang out with them, but I want them to live unmolested and happy in their own corner of the world.
In particular, I want orangutans to be just fine. As I now like animals, I support a lot of organizations that work to protect them, and these organizations are always sending me calendars featuring twelve glossy photos of animals either looking majestic and wild or else doing something cute. One of my favorites shows a baby orangutan crouching on the ground, looking really unhappy and holding a piece of wood over his head to keep the rain off his face--it’s unbelievably adorable! I showed it to a friend, who said, “He thinks he’s people.”
“No,” I said. “He just thinks it’s better not to get pelted in the face with cold rain if at all possible.”
Now, you’re probably wondering what all these things have to do with each other, so I’ll tell you, though it will take a while to explain it all.
Monday I read this article about the discovery of a previously undocumented colony of 800 orangutans in Borneo. People who lived by the orangutans knew they were there, but conservationists and scientists didn’t. It’s a big deal. But the peat swamp where these apes live is already slated for destruction so that palm kernel oil plantations can be created, so even if no one just goes out and slaughters the orangutans, they’re probably going to die. Plus turning a peat swamp into farmland releases tons of CO2 into the air, because peat swamps are carbon sinks. It’s all really, really bad.
Then I read another article about how global warming is causing expansion of the tropics, which is changing weather patterns in ways that are going to fuck things up for billions of people, plants and animals. Things are looking especially grim for Australia, where shifts in wind currents are beginning to push storms further south, which means that rain will fall on the open sea where it’s not so necessary, rather than on Australia, which is a pretty dry continent to begin with.
And as I was driving home from having my teeth cleaned that afternoon, I thought, OK, the story of Noah and the ark is A) utterly impossible and B) didn’t happen because it’s C) a myth, but if it WERE possible, would several thousand years ago really have been the best time to call a do-over? Wouldn’t NOW be a better time to pick a few carriers of really good genes for every species and send them off to safety while killing everyone else? (Actually I’d advocate saving all the animals, not just one reproducing set. They'd need a head start before the next go-round of humanity vs. everything else.) Wouldn't the time to do it be right now, before we kill off most of the animals the mythical Noah would have wanted to save? Right now, before we fuck up the climate so badly that all but a few areas of the planet are uninhabitable?
But then I remembered that I don’t really like theologies or world views that treat most of humanity as either A) expendable or B) a mistake, so I decided the whole “flood the earth and kill almost everyone” thing is never really a good idea.
To be continued.
Posted by holly at December 7, 2007 9:39 AM
Weird... My died-in-the-wool, Republican-from-his-mother's-womb, conservative Mormon dad told me recently that he didn't think he could vote for Mitt Romney, because he thought the Republicans were leading the country in the wrong direction on health care and the environment. (He's also changed his mind about gay marriage.)
I mean, this is a man who can't stop watching Fox News when he comes to visit.
The end times truly are nigh.