ok, i’m overwhelmed.
i’ve got to stop clicking apple news every 2 hrs or better yet, envision how shutdown might change the world for the better -- people will want more time w/neighbors & family, less time working & driving; will re- fuse to go to back to work unless the 1% are taxed again; we’ll get so used to less traffic we’ll want car-free streets; welcome foxes and hedgehogs to our residential neighborhoods; we’re now so used to clean air that govt’s will have to shut down coal yeah. hold that thought. [meanwhile 24,000,000,000 people internally displaced by x-treme weather in 2019 (not counting those who migrated across borders) & now we must pandemic-distance but how to do so in gymnasiums or church halls as makeshift shelters? or on the buses taking us out of harm’s way? or in refugee camps, w/o enough water or soap? now is not the time to have a natural disaster, if you can help it; definitely don’t need medical care . . . but siberia is on fire again, w/ abnormally warm weather; also, > 100˚ temps + windstorms in myanmar; landslides in sarawak; & in são paulo, deluge last month, drought this: 10% avg rain for last 27 days; in yemen, “countless families have lost everything”: no dolphins in those flooded streets; floods, too, in kenya, rwanda, & vietnam, where 7k acres of cropland destroyed & o yeah the locusts have made it to pakistan “third-world problems”? think again: mandatory evac’s in canada’s oil city, mcmurray, alberta (deluge); residents in evac centers must socially-distance in company; & in b.c., scorched earth now gets swept by snowmelt, turning creeks to rivers that “eat out the sides of banks & pull down dirt & stumps creating a mud bog that flows down the stream”; one city commissioner calls it the single- largest flood in his area in 200 years (tho how he knows . . .); while in germany, 5% of avg rain & the rhine is drying up . . . plus: the earliest-ever tropical depression forms in the pacific] in my head i hear “imagine” by dead john lennon playing. don’t let a good crisis go to waste, they say. ok. . . . so say i’m not overwhelmed. what do we do then?
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |