If we really think about it, I think we're led to an underlying basic desire that causes us to want to control the world in which we live no matter what we may be confronting at the moment to the contrary. We want to think that the carbon fuels upon which our lust for energy depends is not harmful to our environment; that the pandemic virus we're currently facing isn't a major threat to our lives; that we can just go on living like most times we've found has been the successful modi operandi in the past; and things will be okay for us. So that climate change is just a minor shift in temperature which our planet is now recording; nothing really to get all alarmed about--we're just talking a matter of a few degrees.
And if there's one thing that we're sure able to control is the rules and laws we live by: they really can be regarded by us as the immutable givens--because we've made them and have dedicated ourselves to live by them!
Ah, but wait. Times change. We think nothing really is different, but at least the calendar dates aren't revisited. Time marches on!
Yet by thinking that the current situation is just a repeat of situations we've handled in the past by laws and regulations we've instituted, we can come a cropper to just some simple delusions. The facts of some present event certainly are not the same as we had before: we confess the dates are not repeats. But should we then conclude, so what!
Well, to a degree we humans, being creatures of habits, are led to believe the present resembles the past. To a degree that assumption works for us; but occasionally we're led to become dogmatic adherents to our habits, and not recognize this principle of regularity in experience has its limitations, that are forced upon us by the details of our current perceptions we ought to be taking very seriously.
In general, to believe the future will be a repeat of the past is as a matter of public policy a willing subjugation of our thinking to that of a dictator or tyrant, whether he wear a judge's robe or a military uniform or a business suit. It's crap!
What we need to take on the future rationally rather than emotionally is to carefully analyze what we face and determine how best to handle it. For no rational person can come away with thinking climate change is just the same thing we have come upon when there's a recurring hurricane or temporary dry spell. And, there's no amount of rationalizing that will lead one to the justifiable conclusion that an unarmed man in handcuffs should be shot dead by a policeman who has detained him for a parking infraction.
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