The "Real News Network" has republished an article captured from Common Dreams: "Greenland Losing 33 Million Tons Of Ice Per Hour." This news is, as the Real News Network properly states, "frightening."
One of my friends, linking to the story on social media, reacted to this story with the following observation:
"Why I have lost hope for the future."
I hate it when I hear about friends "losing hope," not that "losing hope" is not an understandable reaction to the news we read about in the papers, or see on television, or learn about online.
Thinking about it, what the article I have linked to above might more accurately prompt is the following reaction: There is very little hope - or even "no hope," let's go that far - that the future will be like the present. Forget that idea! There is NO hope that the future will be the same as the present. Massive, real changes are coming. And frightening they definitely are!
In other words, if our hope is that nothing will change, as global warming proceeds, then such hope will be in vain. The processes that human civilization has put in motion are going to transform our planet, and thus our lives (and are already doing so).
What comes next, though, as changes occur, will depend on what we do now. Can't we mobilize our hope - one of our "superpowers," as we all should recognize - and try to make sure, given the fact that things will change, that we will (as William Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech) not only "endure," but will "prevail."
If our hope is that nothing will change, that is a vain hope. Give up that hope. But if our hope is that we may come through adversity, when everything changes, to a place in which we can look around and say that we have "prevailed," then "hope" becomes more possible. Without "hope," it seems to me, we may give up. We may not take actions that we might otherwise take, that could help insure that the different future, sure to come, is better than it otherwise would be.
I have mentioned this book before, Ministry For The Future, and it is a book (a novel; fiction) that holds out "hope" that we can react to the upcoming massive changes in a way that not only preserves, but in some ways improves upon, the world in which we live today. The world in which we live today, as we must know, is now slipping away like the Greenland ice.
Let us not give up on "hope." But let us realize that our future, if humanity has one, will come out of our reaction to the extreme challenges to which we must now respond. There is no hope that nothing will change. Massive changes are coming (they are actually here). Our "hope" must be in ourselves, in what we might do, in finding what we are capable of, and in learning that we are capable of great and wonderful things.
That is my hope. I have a tight grip on that.
My best advice: Hang on!
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