Earth On Fire

What comes around goes around. I met some people I work with face to face this week for the first time. We did it outdoors and we have all been vaccinated, and while the delta variant is raging all around us, people are once again dying unnecessarily, and it may not have been altogether perfectly safe, we did it anyway. In a couple of weeks it probably wouldn't happen would be my guess, but it was good to finally talk to each other. One of the things people who are relative strangers do in this scenario is to talk about their families, and it made me thing back to when I started having kids. It was something I definitely did not want to do. The Cold War was coming to a close, but there were still a lot of nuclear weapons in the world, and the fact that one of them might bring about the end of a habitable planet was something I had to face, but I wasn't sure I wanted to bring someone into the world to face. I was and still am hopelessly in love with my spouse and so we did indeed have kids. What I did not see coming at the time, but is now abundantly clear, is that we don't have to detonate a bomb to ruin the planet, we just have to go about business as usual, making few if any changes in how we operate, and the planet will self incinerate. Today is my youngest child's birthday, a child who survived cancer when he was five, only to face this. I hope he can grow old on this planet, but to do so will require real change.