How Evolution and Climate Change Came to Kansas

By a margin of six votes (8-2), there is now both evolution and climate change in Kansas. The Board of Education has spoken with a commanding voice!

Up until now, Kansas did not have climate change. They had only weather; lots of it, much of it very hot or very cold. And even their weather was pretty much something left over from Colorado and Wyoming and Nebraska. But now they have endorsed genuine, long-term climate change.

There are rumblings--pretty much unsubstantiated and cut from whole cloth (I have no idea what that means: it is something dredged up from a very old mind)--that the Board plans to import as much weather as they can from San Diego. Well, that makes sense! I have been in Wichita. San Diego weather is precisely what they need!

And evolution! Do not forget that evolution has now come to Kansas! It will no longer be necessary for God to be blamed for new strains of flu, or for drug-resistant strains of bacteria. Now we can blame it on something that happens naturally. It will no longer be necessary for religious people in Kansas to hold their noses and say that the tornado that took down the barn was an act of God. They will be able to say that when the global climate warms, lots of unpredictable things happen.

I don't know.

There is something comforting about being able to burn coal and blaming God. There is precious little satisfaction in saying the barn blew down by necessity and chance. Better a perverse god than an indifferent act of nature. But I guess those days are gone.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog