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03/17/2008: "How the U.S. Presidential Campaign Looks from the Sweaty Perspective of a Texas Heat Wave"

Humans and the human condition being what they are, I suppose there are no "unstrange" times. Not in your and my lifetimes. Not in any lifetimes.

But these current times are certainly times that give pause.

At the moment here in Texas, we are in one of our summer heat waves. It is not (at least thus far) as severe as the worst in my memory. That was in 1980 when our air conditioner seemed to never quit running. When the entire family went to the community swimming pool every afternoon about 2 o’clock because the thought of facing the rest of the afternoon without a period of extreme, ongoing-for-a-time wetness was simply unbearable. We went something like almost 60 days, as I recall, with a daily high exceeding 100 degrees, accompanied of course by Texas’ non-desert-like humidity. But this summer's retched temperature excess, while not yet recording-setting in its longevity, is already feeling both excessive and retched.

And it certainly created a vivid tableau for reading economist Paul Krugman's column last week in which he quoted a global warming researcher who has estimated that there is a 5 percent chance that global temperatures will end up rising about 18 degrees Fahrenheit. If that happens, then that will pretty much put a wrap on civilization as we know it.

All of which makes the current campaigns for President of the United States seem like travesties when they aren’t coming across as imbecilities.

The Democrats are wimps. Cowardly donkeys braying about change while fearing hourly that they may actually be perceived by the electorate as a party that might bring needed changes about.

The Republicans are simply not trustworthy on any topic, issue or need. They have been so successful at telling lies that they are incapable of recognizing even the simplest truths.

The third party candidates are all clowns of one degree or another, one stripe or another, one sacred cow or another, one silly bias or another.

The thing is, the quality of our politicians and the vapidness of our political discourse and the inconsequential nature of our proposed solutions compared to the rising tide of probable Life-threatening calamities that surround us are what we deserve. That is, what is to be expected given each of our own personal inabilities to act very much differently than we have been acting.

I truly fear for our future.

And I would truly be without hope were it not for a seemingly built-in quality to our neck of the Universe that I tend to think of as the self-righting instinct—or SRI.

Systems do, crowds of people do, individuals do at times institute the most remarkable of turnarounds for reasons that are beyond the kin of anyone involved or anyone looking on, currently or in the future.

One observation about the SRI is that it is really never “happenstancial.” It is always fueled and fed by circumstances. So it is certainly suicidal as a species, facing what we are facing, to fold our hands this time and sit awaiting and expecting the SRI’s arrival.

All around us, there are points needing to be tipped. There are butterfly wings needing to be flapped. There are jeremiads needing to be shouted forth, and there are changes sorely needing to be made or started toward.

There’s the prospect of a planet-wide train wreck looming. As my colleague Paul Kordis confirmed for Americans with his monumental Ph.D. dissertation last year at Colorado State University (more than fifteen hundred final pages containing an unrelenting drumbeat of evidence that America as it is now practiced is unsustainable), there’s a bifurcation coming.

Travel one road and we’re sure to be going the route of unprecedented pain, ruin and dissolution.

Our one, remaining hope is to take the other road. A terribly difficult task when most everyone, including America’s presidential hopefuls, are speeding along the turnpike leading to tomorrow with their eyes so often blithely closed and their sensibilities so often calibrated to their own narrow self-interests.

Yet I’m not one to espouse the view that people should sit out elections—and in particular this election—because “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference" between any of the candidates or parties. My reason, though, for supporting the Democratic candidate is probably not a very widespread one.

I sense something in the Obama phenomenon. I sense the lurking presence of the SRI. I sense that even Mr. Obama can perceive it, even if he most likely doesn’t understand exactly what it is. That would explain some of his alleged “arrogance” and his ability to view much of the daily abuse of the campaign trail with seeming amusement and/or detachment.

Sitting here mulling on all this in this summer’s Texas heat, I suspect that even the more perceptive of the Republicans can sense it. That’s why they have derisively labeled Mr. Obama “The One.”

If he isn’t, then America probably isn’t going to have much of a say in what happens to the planet’s travails—or how it happens. The SRI has a lot more choices and places to choose from this time. And we all best hope that it will soon be getting about the choosing.