Sunday was a miserable and rainy day, and sick with a cold I decided to just lie about the apartment and watch a 9\/11 conspiracy video.Typically, I\u2019m not a fan of the genre. Most conspiracy theories strike me as being too intricate, all involving too many perfectly synchronized and working parts, to live in the same world that I do. I simply cannot fathom how silence and discipline could be maintained throughout all the conspirators and witnesses, when there were are so many compelling reasons in our publicity hungry world for each link in this chain to break?<\/p>\n

No matter, friends whose opinions I very much respected had suggested I watch one, and so on Sunday I did.<\/p>\n

Watching the video\u2014Hidden Secrets About 911 World Trade Center Attack 2001\u2014was a concussive and depressing experience. Unbalanced and without any sort of clear, guiding narrative, the movie hammers away at you in a slightly superior, almost sneering tone. It\u2019s a death by a thousand cuts method of persuasion. The video presents a relentless onslaught of irregularities and suspicions that eventually form a great, hazy cloud of doubt. It\u2019s hard to see your way out of this cloud, and the style of the movie, which is chaotic and smothering, never allows you the space to back up and consider or refute each claim, but leaves you breathless and woozy, choked by the all the dust it\u2019s unsettled.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

At any rate, the experience of watching the movie left me tired, depressed and uncertain, and full of the sense of dread that images from 9\/11 always instill in me I looked out the window at the rain, a foreshadowing of Hurricane Sandy that\u2019s predicted to hit NYC tonight.<\/p>\n

Climate change and the extreme and often unpredictable weather it brings with it, is upon us. Over the course of my lifetime, I can say that the weather has definitely changed and increasingly I think that we\u2019re entering into an age where the new normal is completely unknowable.<\/p>\n

As a culture, we seem remarkably removed from this reality. For instance, this year was the first since 1988 that climate change wasn\u2019t even mentioned in the Presidential Debates. Further, back in August, the Republican Party delayed their convention in Tampa by a day because of the anticipated severity of Hurricane Isaac– which also happened to be the same day that a record ice melt in the arctic had just been announced. There are those in the Republican Party who deny climate change, and in spite of actually delaying their convention because of it, still will not accept that it\u2019s upon us.<\/p>\n

To me, that\u2019s a bit of a head-scratcher.<\/p>\n

For whatever series of complicated reasons, our politics and culture refuses to dig in and acknowledge what a desperate, catastrophic problem this poses. Climate change could annihilate us, but sincerely altering the way we live in the world would be immense, long-term and expensive, and so we simply deny its reality and whistle past the graveyard.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

(Flooding in Brooklyn on Monday morning)<\/p>\n

When 9\/11 took place, America went to war. They dedicated their arsenal of brilliance, money, will and life toward a cause, and I just wish that we would see the potential of Hurricane Sandy in the same way. We need to redirect our efforts– as if in a holy war against terror– to combat and defend ourselves from the climate change in which we\u2019re all so complicit.<\/p>\n

Good luck to everybody over the next few days, and in the years following, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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