The Species That Cried Wolf
A story about Esperanto, the Metric System and climate change…
Comedian George Carlin used to do a bit in which he assured people worried about the fate of the Earth that the Earth was going to be just fine…
But people were screwed.
George reasoned that once we wiped ourselves out with our own stupidity and greed, the Earth would heal itself and return to the Paradise it was before Man and/or Womankind screwed it up.
Many a truth is said by jesters.
Which (not for the first time) makes me wonder why there aren’t religions based on comedians because George Carlin and Richard Pryor and Bill Burr and Dave Chappelle seem to make a lot more sense than the Catholic Church which I probably shouldn’t pick on because other religions and denominations promote goofy ideas as well, but the Catholic Church is the first one I thought of, so I guess it does pay to advertise.
I mean we all know about Pope Francis, but who’s the head Lutheran?
(And if you guessed Luther Vandross or Lex Luthor I think you just demonstrated the problem. Also: how is Lex Luthor Superman’s arch-enemy when Superman can fly and has heat vision and bullets bounce off him and Lex Luthor’s power is he’s smart and a bit of a dick? If Lex was that smart he wouldn’t have picked Superman for an enemy. Let’s put Albert Einstein and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the ring and see how long Al lasts.)
If we based religions on comedians we wouldn’t have to sit in church and read boring passages of a book written by people with non-existent writing skills who thought we were going to be wildly entertained by a list of who begat who and/or whom. Instead, we could watch comedy concerts on Netflix and then debate what Bill Burr meant when he attacked political correctness gone too far and while we might not agree on a conclusion, I’m guessing church attendance would go up by about a kazillion percent.
And speaking of popes…
Pope Francis just made a rule or a bylaw or a Commandment (I’m not up on my current Catholic legal structure) that restricts priests from conducting a Latin Mass without permission from their bishops and the bishops have to make sure it’s what the people want because it seems a certain number of human beings find deeper meaning in a religious ceremony that’s completely incomprehensible.
And face it: Scientology would be a lot more believable if it were explained in Esperanto which is a language made up in 1887 as an international medium of communication, which is interesting because it doesn’t seem like anybody knows how to speak it.
“Muta ideo.”
And if you didn’t know that’s Esperanto for “dumb idea” once again I think you’ve made my point, but it seems to me you’re wandering a bit off track and I’m overly familiar with your problem.
(This is exactly how my mind works with the caveat that I’m only sharing about a tenth of the ideas that bounce off my mind’s guardrails as we ride my train of thought, which is a mixed metaphor, but at these prices it’s like a clothing store Going-Out-of-Business sale and you might have found one shoe you like in a pile of shoes and now you have to see if you can find its mate and hope a peg-legged pirate didn’t buy that other penny loafer and is currently stumping around happily with Johnny Depp on the deck of a sailing ship while searching for lost treasure.)
So where were we before you got me off track?
Esperanto
Right…the idea that we were all going to learn Esperanto and solve the world’s communication problems.
I just googled “is Esperanto a dead language?” and offended Esperanto speakers indignantly say no and also add that as many as 100,000 people speak it, which means if you could get all of them in one place…and let’s make it Kansas City to save me a long drive…you could go from one side of KC to the other and not be able to communicate using what’s supposed to be an “international medium of communication.” If Esperanto’s not completely dead, it’s definitely on a ventilator.
And while we’re talking about ventilators, here’s a cartoon about going back to school in a school that doesn’t require masks…
The Metric System
Our inability to pull together for the common good reminds me of that one year in school when they decided we were all going to switch over to the Metric System and I was kinda pissed off because I’d just learned about “yards” and “feet” and now the American educational system was saying, “Wait…we taught you the wrong stuff, so let’s start over” and I really didn’t want to repeat 12th grade.
(Let’s all rest here while we wait for that joke to catch up to the stragglers.)
Switching over to the Metric System is another idea that has yet to catch on in America because we prefer our football fields to be 100 yards long and not 91.44 meters which also reminds me of the time I drove a car in England and almost shit my pants when I looked down and thought I was going 112 miles an hour.
But I may be getting off track once again, so let’s get back to the Fate of the Earth and its largely moronic people.
Once in a while, the wolf is real
As a species we have a long and rich history of “crying wolf” to get people to do what we want them to: learn Esperanto, switch over to the Metric System, accept Jesus Christ as Your Lord and Savior and use your Uber discount before it expires.
We’ve become so accustomed to these scare tactics that you can buy a coffee cup that says, “Your bad planning is not my emergency” and right now I wish I had one, but I didn’t plan on needing it.
Anyway…
I’m reading about wildfires and droughts and floods and hurricanes and pretty much every kind of extreme weather event except a plague of locusts which I’m pretty sure is on its way and somebody in the story complained about the cost of changing what we do, which totally ignores the cost of not changing what we do.
As the cartoon at the top of this post points out: floods and droughts and hurricanes and rising sea levels also have a cost and unlike that one penny loafer you bought, they don’t come cheap.
Now think about this:
What are the odds we’re going to make the expensive and inconvenient changes necessary to stop climate change when we have the inexpensive and very convenient means to stop the COVID-19 pandemic and just won’t do it because someone on Fox News or Facebook told us not to worry about it.
So now we’ve got some real emergencies – climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic – and we’re not taking them as seriously as we should, partially because we’ve heard it all before and partially because the news media has evolved to the point that everybody has access to their own set of facts.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was asked what he thought about the misinformation campaign being conducted by knuckleheads and people trying to appeal to those knuckleheads and Dr. Tony thought if we had social media and Fox News around back then, we’d still have kids getting polio and wouldn’t have eradicated measles and smallpox.
Every once in a while, the wolf is real and if I recall that story correctly, the end result is we get eaten.
George Carlin had a point.