Regarding my frustrations with climate change and censorship.
It should not be 90 degrees for consecutive weeks in a Midwestern June.
June is for 70 to 80 degrees, July and August are for 80 to 90 degrees — everyone knows this.
But not Gen Alpha.
They have no idea how good we had it. How good they could have had it.
All they know is extreme weather,
TikTok brainrot,
congested COVID classrooms and e-learning on contraptions of cobalt and lithium.
All they know is that every FOX News lady looks the same (but they can’t figure out why),
all they know is their parents get irate when they pick up the “wrong” books for silent reading,
all they know is to blindly trust whatever their screens tell them to believe,
all they know are devilishly sweaty summers and barren blizzard winters — even more threatening than we could have imagined as kids.
(Wasn’t “Jack Frost” just supposed to be a silly horror movie?)
All they know is they live in a society of agitated birds and bugs, yearning for the atmospheric equilibrium their parents last experienced as hatchlings.
The birds are too molten to migrate — too sick from humidity to fan themselves with flight,
the bugs are too overwhelmed by the growing hostility of their environment that they can barely perform the genetic scripts within their delicate organisms;
and weak-winged, weak-willed creatures won’t fight back.
(Or won’t they?)
Gen Alpha bugs can be no caterpillars of the commonwealth.
They are being raised in an overheated hive that manufactures individualism (isolation) for profit.
The hive is infected by phantasms of oxymoron and hidden truth.
And the purposeful obstruction of knowledge is even more infuriating to me than this unwelcome inferno.
(Freedom of speech was always more of a concept than a promise.)
Bugs won’t even spell out “suicide” or “sex” online.
If they do write them as Merriam and Webster intended, they’re at the mercy of Al Gore’s rhythm.
Censorship has already taken the lives of so many.
It’s the most silent of killers.
It’s fascism’s flagship.
And the grasshoppers at the top have always had the power to stop it all.
(I want to become a lobster and rest in a bowl of ice. It might signal my impending doom to lie there, but at least I would only have the limited consciousness of a lobster. And boiling to death can’t feel too different from what I’m going to experience every summer for the rest of my life.)