The bad news is the Earth is getting hotter than a flaming marshmallow at a Sunday picnic. The good news is we will find the solution, we always have.
Humans are amazing. We have fantastic powers to keep going. We overcome all our problems, that’s how we’ve kept going for two million years, from living in the trees to walking in space.
Our latest problem to overcome is Global Warming, no worries, someone might come along and build a super de-warming device. It could be a huge spacecraft that orbits the Earth and shoots an invisible dry-ice ray that cools everything down.
Or some Einstein will invent a device that turns car exhaust into clean air.
The naysayers on global warming might suddenly wake up and everyone will work together and shut down all the polluting factories. People will drive electric cars, and global warming will return to normal, something like that.
I know what you’re thinking: I’m a crazy dreamer and totally nuts. But maybe not.
What if someone back in 1903 saw the Wright Brothers fly a rickety contraption for a few seconds and then said we’d be flying to the moon in 65 years.
What if he went on about how we will build giant metal flying machines that carry hundreds of people from one side of the world to the other. You’d think he was a crazy dreamer, but guess what? We fly all the time.
How about if someone in the 1920s said that someday those old black phones on the wall would turn into hand-held devices that showed your face on a little screen and let you see and talk to someone else across the world.
What if he said that we’d be able to talk to any person and company on Earth, buy things with your phone, and send money to friends at the touch of a button!
You’d think he was nuts, but how ‘bout that smart phone of yours?
What if someone back then said that there would be square boxes in our living room that received invisible beams through the air that transmitted entertaining shows onto a screen for us to watch. Pretty wacky, but what’s on TV tonight?
And what if someone early in the last century said there would be tiny drops of liquid injected into your skin to protect you from polio, small pox, the bubonic plague, measles, mumps, chicken pox, and a disease called COVID. Would that sound believable? No, but here we are.
Here in Hawaii, we have the most fantastic tale of all.
Who would think that a few people sailing wooden canoes, following stars, sharks and seabirds could travel thousands of miles over open ocean and land on a tiny island, then build up a few palm tree huts into a royal kingdom.
And in time they would rig up a complex system on these small islands to sustain over a million people on a few big rocks jutting up from the sea. Pretty amazing.
So don’t laugh at outrageous ideas and inventions, they always show up to save us. Bad times bring out the best in us. Darkness always holds some light for us to find, and we do every time.
Global warming, a pandemic, forest fires, we’ll get through them all. We have practice at it, we’ve done it for two million years.
It’s not the end, my friends, it’s just the beginning.
Dennis Gregory writes a bi-monthly column for West Hawaii Today and welcomes your comments at makewavess@yahoo.com.