Okay, girls and boys, and even you girls who think your boys, and vice versa. Here’s a challenge for you. Read through the article at this link — Struggling with climate anxiety? You’re not alone — and decide whether it’s a clever troll, or it’s in earnest, and hence we are doomed.

If it’s a troll, then print this article out and bring it to parties. For every goofy phrase, hysterical hyperbole, and nutty neologism take a shot. Best water down the booze first, though, or there will be many crise du foi.

If it’s not a troll, then it will be obvious we are doomed. Because if these people are for real, we cannot survive.

Ready…set…go!

Excerpts For The Busy

These are trying times. Mass extinction, mass destruction, massive injustice — it can be flat-out depressing. One common prescription for climate woe is: Do something…

Climate woe? Take a shot!

No one understands this better than the folks who are knee-deep in these issues every day. So I talked to three solutionaries about how they cope with the stress, and how they manage to shake the weight of the world off their shoulders…

Solutionaries? Take a shot!

The experts: Olatunji Oboi Reed, founder of the racial justice nonprofit Equiticity, who was named to the Grist 50 in 2018; Kristen Poppleton, director of programs at the youth leadership organization Climate Generation; and Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist turned climate mobilizer who directs the advocacy group The Climate Mobilization.

Equiticity? Climate mobilizer? Don’t take a shot yet. For we next notice that none of the “experts” knows zipadedoodah about physics. Take three shots!

Let’s hear from the “experts”.

KRISTEN: So I started out as a naturalist. But at some point I just started feeling like…Like…like…like…

Like, I was all, like, those are, like, a lot of likes.

OBOI: Well, let me back up a little bit. I’m 45. I’ve struggled with depression since high school…I didn’t acknowledge that I had depression. Then I went to corporate America…So I would get severely depressed, have to take time off, get back to work, be alright, and then get depressed again… I was severely depressed and isolated at home for quite some time…I became a cyclist.

If you can’t see how that ties to global warming, you may be depressed.

MARGARET: So, psychotherapy is kind of my family business. My parents met in clinical psychology graduate school. Virtually all of our family friends had at least one member who is a psychoanalyst. I mean it’s kind of like a religion… The big turning point for me was when my good friend said to me, “Discourse isn’t enough. Think: What could you do to actually solve this problem?”…I just realized there’s nothing else that I want anywhere near as much as I want to do everything I can to try to, as we say at The Climate Mobilization, cancel the apocalypse.

I look forward to her treatise “Carbon Dioxide’s Vibrational Modes and Their Relationship To Penis Envy”.

[KRISTEN] I mean, I live in probably the most liberal neighborhood of one of the most liberal cities in the state of Minnesota, which is one of the most liberal states in the country. My friends are all on board with climate change being real. But it’s still like a weight you carry around that you feel like no one else really gets. It’s this burden. Even my husband, he’s like, “Oh, that’s your job to carry that burden,” you know? And when people say, “It’s so great you’re doing that,” I’m, like, “Uh, hi. Everyone needs to do something!”

Uh, hello. I’m like, shocked that, like, this female, like, found a man to, like, share her life and, like, burdens.

[OBOI] What’s hurtful and harmful for me is the racism inherent in the work. Shortly after I started the bike club, the mayor [of Chicago] at the time, he was rolling out this huge strategy for bikes, right? Bike lanes, and Divvy — our bike-share system. And I was quoted in the New York Times, in essence saying, it’s great what the mayor is doing, however, should the historical pattern repeat itself, bicycle resources will be concentrated in predominantly white and middle- to upper-income neighborhoods, and we’ll see a trickle of those resources.

Oh, boy.

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