In the café at the end of the world

“They’ve gone overboard with jabbing everyone….. Covid, it’s just a cold, it always was.” So the woman in her late 50s or so tells her older companions, at about 1pm, on Thursday September 21, 2023. They seem to agree, or at least not argue the toss.  There can be as many dead as you like. You can always explain it away.

Her group goes. Twenty five minutes later there are a mother and daughter (I think) sitting at the table. The daughter is carrying a baby, no more than 3 months old (“12 weeks tomorrow” I hear her answer the waiter). Crying away. And I think “oh my, what a world YOU have be brought into.  See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.”

And I when I look at these people – XR, JSO, ABC –  in my Twitter Stream (extreme?) getting nicked now, and sent down now, well, obviously I applaud them. And sometimes – but less and less often though –  I think “where in gaia’s name were you twenty years ago, when it still might been able to make a tiny bit of difference?”

It’s largely a rhetorical question, because the answers are obvious, at least to me.  Here goes –

For a lot of them, they weren’t born, or they were young children. For the older ones, well, they were busy raising kids, helping raise grandkids while juggling jobs and so on.  The biographical availability was low.

The public awareness of just how fucked we were, it wasn’t “there” yet. 

And anyhow, besides the utterly dysfunctional “let’s have an annual hand-hold and chest-beat” that was the  Camp for Climate Action, which had flamed out by 2010, there wasn’t anywhere, organisationally speaking, for them – even if they wanted – to put that energy and fear, even if it did exist.

And here we are, utterly fucked, utterly doomed. It will be what it will be, which is Biblical (and to be clear, I mean Old Testament, with a lot of smiting; not the New Testament with all that “hold hands and sing kumbaya” nonsense).

And I look at that 12 week old baby and I am filled with horror and dread for its future.  I am not sure it will outlive me. And its mother and grandmother seem to have absolutely no clue about what is coming.

So it goes.