It’s not exactly apocalypse. The poorly addressed climate-change crisis is coming to a head.The likely collapse of American democracy, yes, is terrifying. The fact that the sea will soon be mostly bereft of fish and sea mammals–it makes me deeply sad and of course it is frightening.
But then the Roman empire fell, the Black Plague happened, the endless wars, The Holocaust happened, and–sadly–humanity is still here. We had to stick around so we could destroy many other forms of life, it seems. But not quite apocalypse.
Do you know what it is? It’s a dumpster fire–and picture someone slowly and steadily, at an ever slightly increasing rate, pouring gasoline into the dumpster…
Things are bad enough that even the New Yorker publishes cartoons like this one: