I am a communist. Saving the planet is rubbish. It’s too late for the planet. Your culture of death is going to implode, not explode. We know. Children are already the canaries in the coal mine. Whenever the NYT dives down into the rabbit hole of hopefulness, I’m thinking here we go again. The pretty children running in the wheat fields of our hopeful imaginations. Man should not be hopeful. But imaginative. There are too many Homo sapiens on earth. If people think it’s too late to turn anything around, they will stop trying. How does it matter. You’ve saddled your future children to a shortage of time.

The reality is that climate change holds us hostage. Forecasting was off by about a century. It’s not arriving. It’s right outside your front window. “But if we just work together.” Please. It’s not unlike a village garbage dump. Stinks. It’s dangerous. It’s not going anywhere. Garbage itself drips and floods, and heavy metals seep into the groundwater. So we have entire villages buying their water in plastic bottles which end up in the same dump leaking acrimony among people who don’t have the money to buy their water. People boil their water for longer periods of time than they ever used to. Thinking this will kill bugs. It will. But heavy metals that cause cancer are not germs. You can’t wish them away or sing a happy song.

Cinderella has brain cancer and her pumpkins are laced with PCP. The hopefuls insist that I’m wrong. That they as workers, not managers, seek answers to the physics of how long can this good weather we have last. It’s getting worse. I have ridden shotgun on a motorcycle to escape wildfires that are moving faster and with more ferocity than any global event ever seen before. The children of the future will be slaves. Land owners are never slaves. Children will be bought and sold like the property they already are. How many times have I had to listen to editors insist: You Have To Make It Sound More Hopeful. But why. Where is the evidence that adults can address this problem. What problem. The problem of capitalism and how it has ruined us. We drank the Kool-aid. Then, we had another one. Expecting the desired result would be the whirlwind of mistakes. We played in Vegas and we lost the ranch. Hit the road. Hopefulness is insane. Our species hates itself. Famine will spread. It already has. There will be nowhere to buy uncontaminated food. Or anywhere to grow it. Famine and health care will decide what happens next to the tribalism and the bubbles we live in. The idea of having more children when the ones we have now are poisoned by their parents’ malicious hatreds, is beneath contempt. A pox on both your houses. Famine is certain death because we need it to be. Exactly.