"Flooding is a constant enemy of the fragile art city, with every new incursion damaging its medieval and Renaissance palaces. Officials on Sunday railed against decades of delay to a plan to build underwater barriers against the sea. 'My feeling is rage and recrimination for those who have wasted years and years before starting the work,' Giancarlo Galan, chairman of the Veneto region, told Ansa newsagency."
Rage and recrimination! We'll be experiencing a lot of that when U.S. coastal cities start taking the plunge. I think Giancarlo Galan's words should be emblazoned on a giant plaque and personally hauled to the doorstep of every American citizen. Because, beneath its fading allure, Venice is an alarming microcosm of the entire planet.
On another environmental note, I've become exasperated by people who take great pride in reminding us that "Our children are the future." No they're not. We are. Our children just get saddled with it, and by the time they take the reigns it's conceivable it might be too damned late to make an appreciable difference. Equating the next generation with the future is a thinly veiled attempt to escape the sheer fucking immediacy of the problems that haunt us now.
Bush's dubious election is indeed a huge step backward that may well be looked back on with an exceptionally fierce breed of Galan's "rage and recrimination." But what too many of miss is the fact that we're living the "good old days." Right now. The life we experience, as dystopian and threatening as it is, will seem acutely idyllic in 30 years. Of course, that makes it all-too-easy to slack off, to wait serenely for the last possible moment.
The biosphere is running through our fingers like fine sand. It's becoming clear that politics are not the answer, as we become increasingly mired in the solipsism that is the lifeblood of the New World Disorder.
These are the days of stagnation; these are Giancarlo Galan's "wasted years."
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