Bonus Post: Climate or War?

"Climate or War: the bigger problem" sounds to me like a prompt for a post about how these "problems" have historically been used as pretexts for schemes of global tyranny. I think there is some basis for thinking of climate as a major problem...but, unless people wake up and take responsibility for the real problem of local warming, climate will either turn out not to be a major problem or to be an unsolvable one. So long as people keep yapping about bigger or global government being the only solution to the problem of global warming etc. etc., people will keep arguing that the facts don't even support the perception of global warming as all that much of a problem...right up until the facts prove either that global warming isn't happening, that it's not a problem, or that it's out of control and going to destroy us all. Whichever the case may turn out to be. It'll take at least fifty years to find out and, this close to the end of my aging-as-a-cyberspace-entity-by-decades as being fifty years old, I don't expect I'll ever know. 

Whereas war certainly is a major problem, but people who are not personally affected by it are quite capable of cheering it on. After all, the repertoire of potential human behavior does include mass violence of a kind that seems to demand mass violence as a consequence. Israel might have the technical ability to track down the Simchat Torah attackers, by ones, and allow their widows and orphans the chance to live at peace in Gaza if they curse the attackers, defile their graves, and pledge allegiance to Israel--or peaceably emigrate to wherever they can get permission to immigrate on the grounds of their families having been disgraced beyond endurance; whichever. That would be modern and enlightened and humane. But, as we've all seen, at least in the short term it's simply more human to want to flatten the whole dang strip of desert where the vile little cowards are hiding. Burn the towns over their heads, including the nursing homes and the kindergartens, because nits make lice and God will sort them out...it's an ugly reaction, but it's human. Accepting tyranny as an end to war has worked, locally, for short periods of time, but it's not human and it's never worked for even one generation of humans--because tyranny does not end war, any more than it would end global warming.

Can we just agree that tyranny, or "global governance" or whatever the latest name may be, is not a valid solution, and move on from there? At least that way the discussion of what is possible, within the repertoire of behavior for our species, could be intelligently human.

Meanwhile the less than inspirational thought of how humans seem, generally, to think of climate and war suggests at least a snarky poem for NaPoWriMo:

"Though War destroys poor people's children trapped within its net,

Climate," he huffed, "would ruin my day by causing me to sweat!"

Image by Craiyon.com.