When I was a kid, I remember seeing clouds of them in the school field when we went out to play. There used to be so many that they would cover your windshield. For the last few years I have hardly seen any around. Today, I only saw a single solitary bug lazily flying through the air.
I suspect the rapidly changing climate is the cause but, I guess I feel a bit of shock at realizing and reflecting on the fact that this is happening right at home.
I understand that part in a general sense, though it is overwhelming to think of the scale of all the processes you described, and makes them in a sense invisible to many people. I guess seeing a symptom of it right in front of me makes it a more real to me.
It’s tough to internalize these things, even if intellectually you might be aware of them. One shocking moment might put everything you knew into perspective… but there’s no guarantee that you’ll have that moment.
I think a similar thing happens with liberal’s support of the genocide in Gaza: if they saw it with their own eyes, there’s a good chance that they might do a 180 and stop supporting Israel. They maybe already had all the information, but having it rubbed in your face is what it takes to really internalize it.
Another example: it’s well known among even most of the general public that Miami is going to be underwater eventually. But some of those people, the young ones, are going to have this experience decades from now, where they’re standing on the shoreline looking at the ruins of a submerged city, and think “goddamn, I knew it was going to happen, but it hits different when you’re standing here looking at this city that’s juat gone”. It’s something that doesn’t seem real… until it seems very real, and you’re surprised by how it snuck up on you.
I guess that on reflection, a good part of the shock comes from realizing only a year ago that these processes are happening right now on a accelerated time table. What people had been told over the last fifteen years was that this was a process that would unfold over the course of the 21st century, of which I could expect to see half of it over my lifetime. What is sinkIng in is that these processes will occur rapidly over my lifetime and the world will be a profoundly different place than when I was growing up at the start of this century.
It brings about a fear of the uncertain which at times I find myself comparing to the fear felt by those generations that lived through the last great crisis of capitalism in the 20th century. I suppose that is what it is at the end of the day, and if I were a historian of any kind, I might consider with appropriate foresight naming this period the Crisis of the 21st Century.