Bleakest part is you aren't being hyperbolic, you're being realistic. I said "dealing with this is literally going to remake the landscape" and I meant it. Prior to the Army Corps of Engineers and sucking the Ogalalla dry, the Great Plains were the Great American Desert and the ecosystem out there consisted largely of prairie dogs, condors and bison. Two out of three of those are effectively gone and where they'd live is covered in Midwesterners and corn. The American Savannah is not going to come back on its own and even if it did it would require the middle of the country to move somewhere else.

Thing is? The proximate cause of the Syrian Civil War is climate change. The proximate cause of the Border Crisis is climate change. Drily and dispassionately put, "kids in cages" is the expression of a policy debate regarding global warming. There's 18,000 people in Inyo County and 18 million in Los Angeles because of water wars. I got a friend who's a Lebanese refugee - he got out of Lebanon while the Phalangists were still rabble-rousing rather than shooting. I got friends who are Iranian refugees - they got out when SAVAK was shooting people on the sly rather than in the open. Los Angeles looks like Los Angeles in no small part because enough of the cinema and artist community bailed on Berlin between the Beer Hall Pusch and Kristallnacht. Some people get ahead of the tragedy, do what they can to rebuild their lives and try to throw back a few sea turtles.

Most people drown.

I am subjectively rich. I am objectively middle-class. Through hard work and cunning I managed to cobble together a life. Thing is? My parents managed to fail their way to a better life than I got because things were way the fuck easier for them. And everyone around me has gotten where they are by hustling while their parents sit back and wonder why their kids are such failures. And they're proud of their kids nonetheless because apparently everyone these days is an utter fuckup who just can't get ahead because, well, surely it isn't because life is hella harder than it was in the '70s.

But it's hella harder than it was in the '70s and I think we all subconsciously know it. It occurred to me that one big problem is from about 1930 to about 1980 if you were white, things were gonna be largely okay. Other white people had your back and the rules and policies that governed life in these here United States made it so that rich people pretty much had to do kinda sorta the right thing towards poor people.

But drives towards racial equality came hand-in-hand with drives against economic equality so the rich people banded together and because rich people have more education it was easier for them to see that they have more in common with a rich person in Venezuela than they do with a poor person in the United States but the poor people in the United States? They still think the darkies are out for their job (which realistically speaking they are) but rather than band together with the poor people that aren't their color they still expect the rich white people to save 'em.

I have no power to improve things. I can't fix this. It seems unfixable. But I created five jobs this year, three of which belong to minorities, one of which belongs to a felon and all of which belong to women. I left the house with a garbage picker and two empty bags and returned with four full bags of garbage (two empty bags were on my goddamn walk). Because sometimes you have to make things a little better even in the face of inevitable catastrophe.