Gratitude For Snowy Saturdays

Snow has finally made it to Southeastern Michigan, and it looks as if the ground will have a decent blanket for some time to come (I know that seems shocking to those of you who live in the Ohio Valley or D.C. which has since seen winters to put our historic ones to shame).  This is the first decent snow cover we have seen in Livingston County for well over three years now, a sad situation that has gone hand in hand with extremes of heat and cold, prolonged seasonal lag, and even tornadoes in March, something I thought I would never see.  I write this now because I am thankful that we are seeing something of a real winter this year so far.  I write this because I have seen so many people posting about the snow in Cairo and claiming that such is evidence that global warming is a hoax.  Perhaps it is, but what is not a hoax is that the world's climate is changing dramatically, rapidly, and through our actions.  Snow in Cairo, week long freezes in Florida, an August here in Michigan that felt more like an October, followed by a September that felt more like a July?  These are not normal things, and they are happening more and more.  Hurricanes are turning into half-a-continent wide superstorms.  I, and people like me, don't say these things to scare you into something.  What good does it do me?  What do I get out of it?

On the other hand, there are politicians in the pocketbooks of corporate leaders who want you to feel like this is all some Leftist conspiracy meant to take away even more of your guns, religious freedom, and force you to give money to poor people or else the Planet might explode.  Truth be told, I could care less about your guns as they are your property and not mine, but I do care about how you use them and if you have the right judgment to know when a good time to use them would be.  Truth be told, I don't want religious freedom taken away as I view religion as I view the rest of human everything, an incredibly good thing, again, if used properly and for the sake of looking into our place in eternity.  I myself am a Roman Catholic and believe in my heart and soul that Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, which is a very good thing because I have so many, many bad things to be accountable for.   I'm thankful that I can proclaim this without being shot by some control freak despot who thinks I should be something else.  Truth be told, I don't want you to be forced to give money to some poor person, because you might just miss the point of what that deed means.  I want you to understand what life is like for that person and to see them as more than just some required object of charity, as they are much more than that.  Money, like any resource, should be also more than just an object and used a bit more responsibly than we tend to use it, at least in Canada and the United States. 

I could keep going, but this is not a political blog.  Why bring it up at all, you ask?  I bring it up because this is a very political continent.  I tend to view such a reality in a positive light, even while I can sometimes be pessimistic about the path to open war we seem to be set on.  I say this because politics of our sort does have a good side wherein change can come a lot quicker than in more sedate democratic societies.  While I tend to think that extreme partisanship is a dreadful thing that weakens us all, I think that having sides at all means that we care a great deal about some issues.  That partisanship, though, can lead us to believe that we have to follow a certain line and that yucky, ugly things like "climate change" are part of the package of the "other side" and we must therefore think of them as little more than a blinding toxin.  I could probably keep blabbering on here to tell you why climate change should not be just dismissed as a political issue of the opposition, but I think for now I will let this wonderful video do the talking for me:

http://www.upworthy.com/the-future-of-the-earth-s-next-100-years-visualized?c=ufb1

Our continent, and indeed our world, is a precious thing.  It is our home, and we are responsible, as its most dominant species and/or as its caretakers entrusted by God not to keep vomiting on it the way that we have been.  Yes, we do need to rise above political agendas from both sides (looking at you Kyoto accords, you dirty, self-serving German brainchild designed to cripple economies you don't like), but we also need to understand that we are having a really bad effect on our planet. 

In the meantime, there is a solid blanket of snow outside, we are getting a good amount of winter chill needed by the local assortment of ecosystems to thrive, and it does well to remind me that while change is a constant in nature, there is a plan for it and us that are far beyond what our limited visions can even imagine, a plan which our arrogance needs to be reviewed in the face of.  The celestial time table could give a you-know-what about your stocks and futures.  In the meantime, I am happy to have a reminder that I don't actually live in the South that I look at with envy, because down South they don't have these:

I-94 near Port Huron, some of the southernmost Paper Birch (Betula Papyrifera) around. 

And for the moment, I am glad to be reminded that we do, and that I live at the southernmost whispering edge of the amazing hemisphere-spanning Boreal forest.  Those lovely birch there are still holding their own despite thousands of years of gradual climate change after their prime northern weather retreated with the Laurentian Ice Sheet.  They are a testament to a grand plan in which some things do remain constant despite and/or even in the midst of so much change, a reminder that a greater mystery always remains above our little plans and fields of vision.  As the elegance of the birches reminds us, though, not entirely being in control is hardly as bad as it might seem.  This Saturday night, when someone my age should be out getting bombed somewhere, well, I'm instead just happy because I see that pure white blanket outside.