Have you ever considered playing Russian Roulette?
If you don’t know what that is, check this.
If you haven’t, why not? It’s just got to be a huge adrenaline rush, when you pull that trigger…(if you live long enough to get that adrenaline in your bloodstream, that is!).
Is the issue that you consider your life to be too valuable to risk, over a game of chance? Good! It sounds like your head is on straight today, so lets play a little (safe) game, using Russian Roulette to illustrate a point:
Let’s say there’s lots of money on the table and you get it all, if you can get the nerve up to play one round, pull that trigger just one time and survive. Would you do it? Of course, your next question to me would be, “Well, Buzz, how much money are we talking about?” Well, what would it take? $10,000? $100,000? Perhaps a million dollars? A billion dollars?
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and posit that you would not gamble your life for any amount of money. I congratulate you on your sensibility.
So how can I get you to play? What if I make the odds better for you? Let’s say I can manufacture a revolver that holds more than six bullets, say ten? Would a 90% chance at survival be enough, if the amount you would win is a cool million dollars? What the heck, let’s go ahead and make it ten million dollars. Would you pull that trigger?
What if the gun had a huge cylinder, with 100 chambers and only one of them holding a bullet? Would you play?
No? How about 1,000 chambers? 10,000 chambers?
Some of you may be considering it at this point, but I’ll bet 99.9% are still saying, “No freakin’ way, Buzz!“
So, to those of you that would not risk your lives, I just wonder if you’re already playing Russian Roulette, without involving a gun, but just haven’t realized it yet.
We are an incredibly divided nation, politically speaking. We listen to media (including social media) that tells us the exact opposite of what the media for “the other side” says. It gets difficult to know who’s telling the truth, especially when we have no training or experience in the field under discussion.
Today, there are many people who honestly believe the Earth is flat. Since the early 1960s, we’ve all been watching as NASA and the space agencies of other countries sent satellites, people into orbit, sent men and machines to the moon and robotic probes to every single planet in our solar system. Heck, we have two probes that have left the solar system and are in interstellar space! Even before those achievements though, we had fighter jets, spy planes and even some balloons that could fly high enough to reveal the curvature of the Earth. Once smartphones with cameras became available, amateurs launched their own balloons to take smartphones up high enough to observe the Earth’s curvature. Still, some people believe it is all a hoax, perpetrated by governments, the “illuminati” or any myriad of boogeymen, although for the life of me, I cannot understand what those people think the motivation of these shadowy figures would be. How would they profit from lying about it? I really just don’t understand, except that our media, having failed us as a source of truthful information, have a sizable portion of our population doubting anything an authoritative person or organization might tell us.
It’s good to use critical thinking when you’re being told new information, but that may be carrying it a bit far.
That much doubt cripples us. To move forward into the world confidently, we need to understand it, but our politics, being what it is, forces us to choose a side, in order to gain that feeling of confidence and to enable us to function in the world. Some of us have definitely selected the wrong source for our information, as the flat Earth example illustrates.
Here’s why I started all this with Russian Roulette:
97% of climate scientists have agreed that the climate is changing and that mankind’s activities are causing it to change. We are seeing damaging weather events occur over much of the planet at a never-before-observed frequency and severity. Ice shelves and glaciers around the world are disappearing at an incredible rate and that rate is accelerating, faster than even our scientist thought possible. Our government, or half of it at least, is focused on this threat. Even our military is telling us that climate change is a national security threat. These are serious people with serious credentials and education and they understand the data better than I. Unless you’re a climatologist they understand it better than you, too. Perhaps we should listen a bit more closely and change what we do that’s causing the climate to change. Many of those scientists have stated that there is a tipping point coming, beyond which there will nothing we can do to stop runaway environmental damage. The results will include: wars fought over access to water, large-scale crop failures and famines in which millions will perish, large-scale refugee migrations that will destabilize existing societies and other dystopian outcomes too frightening to imagine.
Still, many people I know, including dear friends think climate change is a liberal hoax.
“What about the other 3% of scientists?” you say. Well, think back to when the Surgeon General declared tobacco as a cause of the increasing occurrences of lung cancer. Did all the doctors and scientists agree? No! There was a small minority who chose to line their pockets with money from the tobacco industry and betray the public trust. There were studies falsified for that purpose. However, this having occurred before the current lack of faith in the media and science, we believed. Some still didn’t quit smoking and we see commercials on television today where those people are begging kids not to start smoking. Those victims are usually horribly disfigured by cancer, struggling to breathe without assistance or suffering from advanced heart disease.
Still, people continued to smoke and a portion of each generation starts the habit, even though they’ve seen the same information and probably have family members that are evidence of the truthfulness of those public service ads. In other words, there are some of us that play Russian Roulette every day, by smoking. Some will “win,” and die of something non-tobacco related although their enjoyment of smoking is all they’ll actually win. That’s a pretty low threshold for the risk, in my opinion. But here’s the thing: Those people played Russian Roulette with their lives, not mine or yours, except for the risk generated by their second-hand smoke, which I diligently try to avoid.
Climate change denialism is also Russian Roulette, but those actively playing the game aren’t just risking their lives, they’re risking all our lives and possibly the survival of all life on Earth.
We all have some culpability in where we are at this perilous time. We’ve all driven or ridden in vehicles that spew literally tons of CO2 into the atmosphere for every single year they’re driven. We’ve allowed oil & gas companies to abandon wells that no longer produce, rather than forcing those companies to seal them. The result is tons of methane (an even worse gas, when it comes to climate change) than CO2.
We are all playing Russian Roulette. Some of us are actively playing it but the rest of us are playing by proxy, against or wills. I wish I had the answer to this, but cognitive dissonance makes it almost impossible to change someone’s mind, even when you present them with the most authoritative information available. I’ll admit that I have just stopped in mid-conversation, when a friend states their belief that climate change is a hoax. The friendship is valuable enough to me and I know that nothing I can say is going to sway them. I know that’s not the answer either, so tell me (in the comments) what you do when confronted with this issue. What has worked? What has failed dismally? How do we get dialog going between sides?
It’s time we stopped allowing denialism to happen. Our gun is running out of empty cylinders and the bullet is getting closer to our heads, every day.
