from the july 22nd, 2020 episode of a late show with stephen colbert i want to call out a couple videos and a couple of thoughts, one profound and one absurd.
the profound is his interview with greta thunberg, or rather, just 17 year old climate activist thunberg herself, she’s special even though the interview may not be (worth watching though). something struck me that shouldn’t have. over and over again she referred to “the climate crisis.” she never said climate “change.” she said “crisis.” and she made the point that although we (especially not in the united states) may not know what good leadership looks like in a crisis, we know what it means to treat something as a life or death crisis. when it’s a “crisis,” its an emergency. people talk about it all the time. the normal rules don’t apply. money is found. money is spent. there are daily briefings.
her point, of course is that prior to covid-19, we already faced an existential threat to the human race, and we have not been behaving like it. she did not minimize the existential threat of covid-19 at all, far from it. she emphasized it and she used it as the example of how it commands our attention and our resources and how we are willing to sacrifice practically anything to stay alive.
i realized that as seriously as i take the climate change, i don’t really take it seriously. witness intercontinental air travel. despite my knowledge of the climate crisis, i was, prior to covid-19, willing to travel to another continent by airplane despite the devastating greenhouse emissions that will cause. now, during covid-19, i would not so much as fly 600 miles as i would thousands of miles, because i fear for my life. this contrast shows that i was mentally minimizing the threat of the climate crisis in a way that i am not minimizing the threat of covid-19.
okay, now to the absurd. for a great laugh and escape from all crises, watch stephen colbert and keegan michael key riff off each other “recalling” movies they had worked on together before the pandemic. omg. i laughed so very hard.
