“It’s a done deal,” my former college roommate, Melissa, pronounces just before dinner. The 25th anniversary of our graduation from Bowdoin is approaching in Spring 2008, and we are discussing how to insert—for old times’ sake—a political demonstration into the celebrations. Otherwise we’re not much interested in attending.“The Arctic caps saw so much loss this last year, there’s no real reversing the damage.”
Traveling U.S. interstate highways, it’s pretty clear we’re a people very busy hammering nails into our own coffins and not thinking about it a whole lot. If it were ONLY that the national debt—a kind of abstract reality that works like an invisible hand on each of our lives—has tripled under the G.W. Bush administration, we might be OK. But the number of tractor trailer trucks hauling ton after ton of stuff to consumer over mile after mile after mile of road; the number of cars, including our own big van, driving and parking and spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: what are we thinking?
The forests of Borneo are said to be shrinking at the rate of three football fields an hour, according to the CBC later that night, as we sit for two hours on a dark Canadian highway in a snowstorm. Another tractor trailer, jack-knifed. It is bitterly cold and windy. As some of my neighbors in Maine might say: what global warming?
As if each of our own experiences, day by day, defines for us the globe.
We give Chanukah and birthday presents to Jordan, who will turn nine in a few days. She is reading a series of illustrated chapter books called Babymouse, which feature quite the feminine, middle-school-age mouse in strong, self-esteeming building narratives. Jordan is an amazing soccer player and does karate as well.
While some things stay the same, some things do change.
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