The Weekly Babble

Eye on the Ball/Prize/Future

I actually watched the NCAA Women's Final between Tennessee and Rutgers. It was a better game than most of the men's Final Four. Those two teams were fast and skilled, and played a fast-paced, exciting game. Rutgers held their own for much of the first half, but Tennessee wore them down with experience and a deeper bench. If I'm remembering correctly, the announcers said that most of the Rutgers starting players were freshman. Tennessee is a big time sports school, while Rutgers emphasizes academics, and hasn't played for the championship of anything for a very long time.

The furor that unwound all week over Imus' remarks about the Rutgers women was remarkable. It came to be about race and gender, about children, about the media and its diversity, and lack thereof. It was also about our basic standard these days of accepting whatever leads to making a lot of money or getting a lot of power.

Thanks in part to Congress being out of session, and the Administration and presidential candidates saying or doing nothing very new, it completely dominated the airwaves all week and all weekend. Now Congress is coming back, and the Justice Department and White House are going to be back on the hot seat. And so is Iraq, where the violence continues and grows.

Here's why there was nothing in this space last week about any of this: apart from weariness of the repetitive nature of these events and controversies, and as important as they are, they will pass, and we'll still be facing the future, and in particular the Climate Crisis.

For instance, Iraq. It can end the future for people there, for people who go there. But there is nothing new about it essentially, and from now on there probably won't be anything new. The talking heads on TV are saying pretty much the same things they were saying a year ago. And nothing really new is going to happen. Now it's just a matter of watching this sickening spectacle play out. By 2009, it will pretty much be over, and it probably won't be over much before that.

That's how it was with Vietnam. By 1971 everything had been said and done, and it was just a matter of how badly the war would end, and when. It's the same with Bush and Cheney. It is very likely they are criminals by statute as well as international law, and Constitutionally they are begging to be impeached. Those wheels are not yet turning and they probably won't because there isn't enough time. It could happen, it should happen, but it probably won't. But it's going to be ugly from here on out, with more outrages to come. And then in two years they'll be gone.

But the Climate Crisis will not be gone. It's clearly here--as the East Coast is currently learning--and it's going to get worse. There are always going to be outrages and crises and controversies over race, politics and American Idol. If all we do is devote saturation coverage and total obsessive attention to each of them as they burn through cyberspace and cable TV, we'll certainly lose the future, which is currently a scary background to the present, but will eventually fill up the present like a flood. And then it may be too late to talk about what to do.

I don't mean people shouldn't be interested or concerned about these matters, or that they shouldn't protest or take political action. It's just that there ought to be some people who keep their eye on what in the present is likely to have the greatest effect on the longer term future, if any. And these days, it feels like one of them would be me.

I've got another blog (Scorched Mirth) which I can use for snark and venting on these daily nightmares. These days however I find that the need or even the desire to do so doesn't last long, and I seldom devote the energy to it. All that news is old news, really, even before it happens. Saving the future is the story worth the focus.