Pass the Waxman-Markey Bill, Or Else

 Whatever happened, it was bad. Cormac McCarthy’s The Roadenvisioned an apocalypse that didn’t kill civilization so much as render it insane. It was literary hyperbole for the sake of allegory. So is this.

Lawmakers in Washington: Please for just one moment pretend that the above scenario is possible, that you are characters in the prequel, and do the right thing on this climate bill that you’re about to vote on.

You’ve heard it all before. We are in the middle of one of the largest mass extinctions this planet has seen thus far, and still people have the audacity to hope for profit over salvation.

I wonder--perhaps with Cormac McCarthy, perhaps alone--if this audacity will cease to govern the choices we make as a society when bands of erstwhile parishioners and plumbers and bankers and bowling alley attendants and suitcase salepeople and itinerant bachelors wander the streets looking for anyone who isn’t “one of them” to bonk on the head and eat. I tend to doubt it these days.