What I’m reading today:
Pretend It’s Aliens
A neat mental trick to understand the climate battle ahead.
By Farhad Manjoo
It’s Valentine’s Day today, and I love this essay! (Also Mr. Man and my family and unicorns, but this I can share:) It’s a genius way of identifying one of humanity’s main flaws when it comes to making change, and then (here’s the good bit) finding a way around it.
…climate change is not war. There is no enemy, other than ourselves. And we are very bad, as individuals or collectively, at fighting ourselves over anything.
This thought chilled me.
Then, one late night after taking a dose of a kind of sleep medicine that is now widely available in California, I had an epiphany:
Pretend it’s aliens.
For years I’ve been saying that if aliens invaded, we’d get over our internecine squabbles pretty damn quick. Sadly, it would also require an actual alien invasion. And while movies of same tend to end with triumphant human victories, they generally don’t show the part where we have to bury all the bodies.
…
Unless it’s not pretend at all?
Just, you know, saying!
J.R. Johnson 
Leave a Reply!