One New Year’s Eve in the 1980s, when I was young and financially far better off than today, I took a ladyfriend to a formal ball at the Washington Plaza Hotel (now Westin), in downtown Seattle. Tickets were $99 each — about $400 in 2024 money.

She wore an Oscar-worthy gown. I wore a suit, but not a tux. We ate lobster, drank piña coladas. The music was in Benny Goodman’s style. At midnight, a thousand balloons fell from the ceiling, and we kissed to ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Then we rode the elevator to a room I’d reserved on the 36th floor, and made love like sea otters.

That was a pretty good New Year’s Eve. Why couldn’t I get that New Year’s Eve, over, and over, and over…?

♦ ♦ ♦

Climate change is not a hoax. It’s already happening, people are dying, and what most of us don’t seem to grasp — even people who know it’s real — is that it’s going to continue getting worse. It’ll never stop getting worse.

No matter how horrid the hurricanes, cyclones, floods and droughts, or whatever climate disaster kills you or lets you unluckily survive, the next one will be worse. That’s the nature of climate change.

That said, is the situation even worse than I, the great pessimist, have understood? Here’s a line from an article in my local paper, about a branch of the city library that’s been remodeled:

Like quantum physics, that number goes against all my common sense. Is it conceivable that even the dirtiest heat system in the oldest library could push thirty tons (60,000 pounds) of carbon particulates into the air in a year?

If that’s an accurate number, not a typo at the Times, sweet jeebers, we are so frickin’ doomed.

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If you click this site more than once a week, you might have noticed that I’ve been writing less. Sorry about that. My writing comes from a light-comedic mood, but the times they are a’changin, the world it is a ‘dying, and light comedy’s not as common any more.

Among many depressing thoughts, one of the most annoying is that I might need to come out of retirement. Not retirement from working; I’m doing OK, long as Trump/Pence don’t end Social Security. But it might be time to end my retirement from pickets and protests.

My marching odometer has thousands of miles on it, from no nukes to gay rights to free Leonard Peltier to trying to stop a few wars before they started — Grenada and ‘the Gulf war’, I think, but it’s blurred in my memory.

Being generally a practical man, I gave up on protests when it became clear that in the modern-day USA, leaders don’t care about public opinion. Protest has accomplished nada in generations, not since ACT UP in the 1980s and ’90s. Since then, America has gone so far into fake democracy and now fascism, that no number of people taking to the street would make a difference.

Also, marching hurts my knees.

But the forecast for January and into the future is mostly cloudy and catastrophic, and the young folks (people under 60) aren’t rising up. So what’s an old almost-hippie to do?

Protest is futile, that’s settled fact — but everything else is futile, too. Limping out of my recliner to shout “Fuck no!” might weigh lighter on my conscience than sitting at home, placidly watching the collapse until the internet flickers off.

12/28/2024

itsdougholland.com 
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