The world is warming up because you and I contributed to it.  The glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, because of our heedless behavior.  Yet, while all this is happening, we are titillated by the notion of buying costly tickets for a ringside seat to the priceless events which are dooming the way we now live.

The Op Ed Page of today’s NY Times speaks to the above while describing how deep pocket groupies for seeing the melting of South America’s glaciers vie for the best seats to see the sights.  One troubling feature of the description of how ticket holders shoved and pushed for the best seats was the corollary picture of a landscape filled with the detritus of citizens of the world who use plastic bags to bring home their groceries.  The ever present plastic that will not erode and be assimilated by the earth for thousands of years litter the landscape that these few must pass by on their way to see the melting and disappearance of the glaciers.

Values are a variable thing.  I might value my silence while my neighbor cannot live without blasting meaningless music and sounds at all hours.  I might work for peace while the war-mongers press on with plans to take over yet another country.  Our candidates might savage one another one day and the next make nice.  There seems to be a consistency in the inconsistent behavior of us humans.

All this speaks to the fact that we are different from one another and to find a middle ground and a likeness that will provide for accommodation between contending philosophies and populations are difficult and might never be accomplished.  The newest phase of Ethnic Cleansing is going on right at this moment in Kenya.  “Ethnic Cleansing” is just another word  for nothing else to lose in the struggle for humans to keep their heads above the rising waters due to the melting down of glaciers thus adding to the rising waters that will drown out the coastlines of most countries.

I saw a couple of maps of what land will disappear beneath the waves as the waters rise.  Say goodbye to Florida in at least one of them.  This is perhaps decades away but it looks like the map-maker is iffy about how much of South Florida will slide beneath the waves in the probable future.  In one of the maps the line where land slides under the sea is about at the place where North Dade is divided from Broward County. At least we are three floors above the new water level.

In any event, the future is sure to arrive one day and what will we be looking at that is what the sight-seers of today see in the melting of glaciers at the bottom of the world.