The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

So Rome burned while Nero fiddled, if we’re to believe our 8th grade history books. The emperor of the most powerful country the world had ever seen had supposedly gone mad and started the fire In Rome A.D. 64, then played his violin while the city burned. Nero, legendary in history for something he probably didn’t do…. Making Rome Great Again, by destroying it if necessary.

Ah, the good old days, back again. Our own Nero just went to the G-7 summit, skipped the climate hearings since he doesn’t believe in global warming, probably sat in his room, not with a fiddle, but a couple of TV sets tuned to Fox and Friends, fuming that the allies he’s repeatedly kicked aren’t interested in his tariff war with China.

Meanwhile … the Amazon rainforests are burning. Greenland’s glaciers are melting. The planet, this fragile little ball of crust surrounded by water, fueled by a molten core and held together with gravity that keeps the atmosphere glued to the surface, spins on its axis as it hurtles through the universe. Why worry? It’s done just fine up til now. You know, if you don’t count meteor strikes and super volcanos and ice ages.

There is something apocalyptic about viewing the Amazon smoldering from satellite images. We’re burning what we call the ‘lungs of the world’, the place we get over 20 % of our oxygen and where C02 is absorbed, the rainforest where more than half of the world’s estimated 10 million species of plants, animals and insects live. If this isn’t an existential threat, I guess there are no existential threats. Sure, why would the New Nero sit in on the climate discussions? The Brazilian equivalent to Trump has let these fires burn, even blamed his political opponents for setting them when the truth is the fires are started by illegal miners and farmers. Gold fever. Same as our fossil fuel industry. Money to be made. The future can take care of itself.

I don’t know and neither do you how much damage is being done while we tune our banjos and string up our fiddles. But to sit and watch the Amazon burning, my god, Nero looks like a choir boy. And to think, we put this madman in office.

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