What The Netroots Are Ignoring

Political pundits, all of them, even the amateurs, tend to look at the future through the prism of the immediate past.

That is, they often fail to see the fundamental changes taking place right under the noses. They instead focus on the minutiae of who voted for whom where, then assume these trends will continue and support candidates accordingly.

Here in the real world, however, elections are most impacted by the events happening between them.  In the case of today’s world these are not random events, but real fundamental changes that call into question whether your grandchildren, and mine, will even survive into adulthood.

One of the best places to track this is at RealClimate, which makes very depressing reading some days.  For instance, one reason global warming isn’t worse is because oceans are trapping carbon dioxide. But this, eventually has an effect. The oceans are becoming more acidic, which will eventually kill all the life within them.

This is just one of many things happening right now, threatening our very existance as a species.

• Are we ready for another Katrina hitting, say, Houston? Or New York?
• Are we ready for a real bird flu pandemic, not just a scare?
• Have we reached a tipping point in which gross climate change is inevitable?
• Indonesians already can’t breathe, because subsistance farmers
  are burning forests. So are Brazilians. So (for that matter) are
  Americans. How long before we lose the oxygen we need to survive?

These are no longer theoretical questions, or (like Social Security)
large scale changes that can be put off. This is really happening
people, right now.

It is absolutely certain that some catastrophe on a
Katrina-like scale is going to hit, somewhere in this world, over the
next two years. And in terms of what is coming, Katrina is like a 6.0
Earthquake. There is worse possible.

Much worse.

Before these threats all your so-called issues — Iraq, the housing
market, Social Security, crime — it’s bupkis. It’s nothing, really.
These are gnat bites.

We’re talking about the literal end of the world in our lifetimes. And it won’t just be a movie.

Against all this all we have is this medium. The Internet is continuing
to grow rapidly, in size and importance, but in many ways it’s not
growing fast enough. Not in terms of the challenges it must confront.

When I write about a New Political Thesis, or a generational crisis, this is what I’m talking about. Not Iraq.

When is anyone, including those in the so-called Netroots, going to start coming to grips with it?