Raining Lizards, Whoopi, and Other Failings of Our Times

Cooling off and wising up

Honestly, I did not mean that Whoopi Goldberg is a failure of our times. After all, she is Guinan. Wise enough. She deserves a reprimand, I guess, but not cancel culture.

The iguanas falling out of trees in Florida, however, are martyrs to our sins.

They are falling out of their perch because cold weather snaps, influenced by extremes due to more heat and moisture in the atmosphere, are dropping them like musical artists are dropping Spotify.

I think all these things are related, believe it or not.

Ignorance, our easy embrace of it, has led us to believe that we are not responsible for the climate disasters. We were easily misled by fossil fuel corporation misinformation. Propaganda. Lies, even.

We are also happy to believe an education these days, about the Holocaust, (or anything) is impossible because of a whole slew of culprits from lazy teachers to Critical Race Theory, to anti-vaxxers.

But, we are also misled by wanting to think our habits do not matter. That it’s okay not to teach science and history. That the economy and jobs are at continual odds. That we should just let technology do the trick. That social injustice and consumption are not linked. That racism and CRT are teaching “hate in our schools.”

Whoopi Goldberg has apologized for saying the Holocaust was not about race, but “man’s inhumanity to man”; she sort of forgot about that whole Master race thing that was inspired by Jim Crow Southern policy and copied by some loser.

Most people know what she meant, but so many of us were so ready to leap on the blame train.

It was dizzying, like waking up on the ground realizing you are a lizard person who fell out of a tree because people make bad choices.

It’s cold, people.

Speaking of lizard people

We are ready to accuse everybody but ourselves. Of racism, of having poor teachers and education, of the ‘other side’ having an agenda.

Some people are even convinced that lizard people are controlling our world.

We wish.

The level of ignorance in our society, and what it costs us, is staggering.

The excuses to everyday racism, sexism, and bigoted phobia are being broadcast far and wide in these days of Rogan podcasts, fake news, Big Lie elections, voter suppression, education tampering, and media that is eager to exploit your need for “scandal”, like the Whoopie one.

People are even protesting because for the first time in our nation’s history we are considering that all Americans, including the Black female, should maybe be represented upon the supreme court after almost 250 years of predominantly white males.

While we go on fighting for justice and diversity, the leadership is paralyzed, and/or involved in their own “Florida Man”, or “Leftist Radical” debacles. Uncertainty about things like the pandemic and job growth keep people panicked. Thus they are the still allowing a record number of open leases to keep dirty jobs and energy by extraction of oil, gas, and coal. They are still using race and poverty to segregate neighborhoods along cancer alley, and chemical alley in the Gulf, to say little about water quality — and clean access to it — everywhere in the world.

People say stupid things. However, we should draw the line at demanding that we teach them in schools, enshrine them in our laws, and whip them out like a rain of lizards just for the sake of our entertainment.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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