Love in the Time of Climate Change (26 page)

“My meditation class? At the Y?”

“That's the one. There must be some single girls there.”

“Mom. It's meditation. You have to be silent! It's not exactly the place to pick up women!”

“Well, that doesn't sound promising. Jesse said you're interested in one of your students. He said she's a science teacher and she's twenty-nine, very intelligent and attractive. He says she seems to like you a lot. Why don't you ask her out?”

Jesus! Just wait till I got back home. I was going to kick his ass. Anything I didn't want divulged to my parents was sure to reach them via the Roommate. My mother adored him for that.

“I love my job, Mom. I don't want to get fired!”

“Fired? But she's your age!”

“She's still a student.”

“Fired! Hmph! With all the work you do for that school they would do no such thing. I've half a mind to march right on over there and talk to that dean of yours.”

God help me! Once again, praise the Lord for the pot.

After dinner, there was the usual uproar over who got do the wishbone. Family tradition was that she or he who found it claimed one end, and the other was fought over by everyone else. Superstition has it that when you pull apart the wishbone, whoever comes away with the bigger half has their wish come true.

My brother's “girlfriend” got the first half.

“I know what I'm going to wish for,” she said, staring straight into my brother's eyes. “You know that outfit I saw online? The one I absolutely can't live without?”

She gets one chance, one wish, and she goes for the fucking dress? Really? This was the best she could come up with?

“The Hammer,” he who busted my balls earlier, won the rock-paper-scissors shoot-out for the other pull and then wrested the bigger half from the girlfriend. He announced his wish for the Patriots to win the football game
this evening. Again, totally unimaginative, uninspired, silly and superfluous—but I could see his point. At least it was something for the common good. A far cry better than the dress thing.

After dinner, suffering from the post-turkey-meal sinkers, we collapsed on the living-room couch to watch the game. Midway through the first quarter, I snuck out to the back refrigerator for a surreptitious gnaw on a leg bone—cheap thrills for the supposed vegetarian that I claimed to be. The score was 7–0, Pats ahead. I came rushing back in to find everyone in ecstasy as the Patriots scored 21 points in less than a minute.

“Holy crapoly!” The Hammer shrieked, still clutching the victorious wish bone in his hand. “It works! It actually works!”

Wow, I smiled. If it was only that easy.

—

On the long drive home I thought about it. I mean, when it comes right down to it, is it really all that wrong to wish for a dress or for the Pats to roll to victory? Isn't it the littlest things that make us the most happy?

If I could get one wish to come true, like the genie guaranteed in Mr. Condom's wonderful presentation, only one wish, I'd be hard-pressed not to go for a chance with Samantha. There was nothing I desired more. Let's face it, if all of the world's problems were suddenly solved, we'd all be battling furiously to keep it that way, neurotic and psychotic that things would revert back to the way they were in a snap of a finger. Fighting like hell to keep heaven intact. And if all the world's problems were suddenly solved, I'd probably still be left single and loveless, down on myself, awkward and alone.

If The Hammer could make magic with the Patriots, maybe there was hope for me!

To hell with climate change! Be gone, guilt! I was going to put me first. Well, me and Her.

OCD or no OCD, I needed that woman! Maybe Jesse had brought home leftovers from his feed, containing, treasure of all treasures, the wishing bone!

Sad and pathetic as it was, it seemed much easier to put my future in the hands (or was it the breast?) of a dead turkey than in my own.

Sigh.

Well if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao You're not going to make it with anyone anyhow. Don't you know it's gonna be (shooby doo) All right
.

—John Lennon, “Revolution 1”

I'
VE ALWAYS BEEN A FAN OF MORAL DILEMMAS
. Options that don't always have a clear right or wrong are fascinating. The Climate Changers were wrestling with a good one.

Pioneer Valley Community College had a foundation, an independent, nonprofit, tax-exempt institution whose sole mission was to support the college. Because the college was a state entity, when people or businesses wanted to donate money to PVCC, it was the foundation that accepted the gift.

The foundation had an endowment of around three million dollars, not even remotely in the same ballpark as private colleges but still nothing to sneeze at. Three million dollars is, after all … three million dollars.

The endowment was invested in a mutual fund. The principal remained untouched, and the interest income was distributed yearly to the college for numerous scholarships to be given to deserving, low-income students. The money these students received had a huge impact on their lives. Scoring a scholarship was a major deal; for some it meant the difference between staying in school or not.

So where was the dilemma?

Like so many other colleges, the endowment's portfolio contained investments in fossil-fuel companies. Needless to say, these were doing quite well; they were investments with a high rate of return, which meant more money for more scholarships. That was the sole purpose, the whole point of the endowment.

There had recently begun a national movement spearheaded by the environmental activist organization 350. org to follow the money and get academic institutions like PVCC to divest their holdings in fossil fuels. Companies would hardly feel the pinch from institutional divestment, but the organizational and educational efforts that went into the campaign, the elevation of The Issue to front page news, was priceless. As an academic institution focused on sustainability, we had an opportunity to put our money where our mouth was. Modeled after the very successful anti-apartheid divestment campaign in the 1980s, which put the squeeze on companies doing business with the racist South African government, the hope was that this, too, would help spark a revolution.

Ignoring the nuanced shades of gray, in strictly black and white terms it went like this: divest in fossil-fuel companies and take a potential loss of income, which meant less money for low-income students, or cede the moral high ground and hope to hell that the details of our investments never get out.

As always, Trevor (
¡Viva la revolución!
) was blissfully unaware
of anything but the stark reality of his truth. I was mildly jealous. It was so much easier to live that way.

“The time to act was yesterday!” Trevor shouted, with a thrill in his voice as if he had just won the lottery rather than revealing the “fossil-fuel blood” (as he called it) on the foundation's hands.

“Let's jump on this. Out now!”

As opinionated and biased as I was, I had a decade-plus of life experiences that grounded me, at least marginally, in the real world. Moreover, my father had taught me a thing or two about investments. Getting out of one portfolio and into another, I knew, wasn't exactly a walk in the park. The devil was in the details.

“I suggest a little more homework before you enter the fray,” I cautioned. “See what kind of hit, if any, the scholarship fund would take. You've got to know the economic impact on students. Maybe get some additional support from other campus groups, see what other schools have done, research the status of alternative investments—you know, stuff like that.”

“I beg to differ, padre,” Trevor bowed in my direction. (“Padre”? Where did that come from?) “The time to strike is when the iron is hot!”

He raised his fist in the air.

“And it's sizzling now!”

This got a loud “huzzah” from most members of the group.

Trevor was a great kid. A terrific organizer. Occasionally a little hot under the collar, a little too quick on the draw. Effective action, in my opinion, required some degree of patience.

Either that or I was just getting old and losing the edge. I shuddered with the thought.

On the flip side, I could see his point. He was twenty years old. You see something wrong and you want to right it and you want to do it now. Not in a few months or a
few years but
now
. Throw caution to the wind. Sometimes getting bogged down in real-world minutiae was the kiss of death for action.

And it was, after all,
their
group. Ultimately, they were responsible for doing their own thing.

“I am only an advisor … I am only an advisor … “I repeated the mantra to myself.

“And why stop at fossil fuels?” Trevor ranted on. “Let's get the hell out of all of this bullshit—the gun makers and bomb droppers, the sweatshops, and Walmarts—”

I looked away, embarrassed.

“—and all their evil minions. Dude, the foundation shouldn't be playing the capitalists' crap game to begin with. They should be investing in the community! They should be keeping the money here, not throwing it in the troughs for the corporate pigs and fat cats to feed off!”

It could be awfully hard to resist Trevor when he was on one of his rolls. Another few minutes of this would whip the Climate Changers into a fearful frenzy. They'd be marching down to the foundation office and taking it over, sitting in, hunger-striking, shutting it down.

Channeling my inner blinking yellow light, Hannah, always the voice of reason, pulled back on Trevor's reins.

“Whoa, Trevor, chill-pill time. Remember the purpose of the endowment. It's for us. For our scholarships. Remember how pumped you were when you got one last year. This is a little like the pot calling the kettle black.”

Trevor ignored her. I could see his annoyance at having his own complicity thrown in his face.

“Maybe we should maintain the focus on fossil fuels and keep Marx and Lenin in the bag until further notice,” Hannah continued.

“Pulling out of fossil fuels is the tip of the fucking iceberg! We've got to pull out of everything! Everything! It's capitalism that's leading us to the brink of chaos!”

“Oh God!” Hannah said, groaning loudly. “Here we go again!”

“Carl Sagan said, ‘It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.' I say: fuck this capitalist bullshit. Let's bring the whole system down!”

“Talk about going delusional!” Hannah shot back. “The foundation getting out of the stock market will bring capitalism to its knees? Economic collapse is the only solution to the mess we're in?”

“I'm dead serious, Hannah. Let's push the whole damn thing over the cliff.”

“We're not lemmings, Carl!”

“I'm Trevor, not Carl.”

“Whatever.”

“‘Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.'”

“Who said that?” Hannah mocked. “Spiderman?”

“Plato,” Trevor replied.

“Don't be a moron, Trev. Total and complete economic collapse is not exactly an option that people are going to buy into. You're off in La-La Land again. There he goes. Everybody, wave goodbye to Trevor. Bye-bye!” Hannah blew him a kiss.

The other folks in the group, mesmerized by this debate, tried to hide their smiles.

“Don't you get it?” Trevor continued, undaunted. “I don't want people to ‘buy into' anything.
Buying
is the problem, Hannah. Did you see what happened on Black Friday?”

He was referring to the Friday after Thanksgiving. The biggest shopping day of the year.

“Some dude was stabbed at a Walmart ‘cause he cut in line! Stabbed, for Christ's sake. We are on an insane path.
Growth, commercialism, buy, buy, buy. It's the antithesis of the solution.”

I couldn't help but smile. Carl Sagan? Plato? Antithesis? This was the height of intellectual discourse. I was digging it. Unless the usually mild-mannered Hannah pulled a knife on Trevor—a distinct possibility given the killer looks she was shooting his way—this was exactly what college was all about.

“Look, Plato.”

“Stop it, Hannah! It's not funny.”

“Carl, Plato, Trevor, whatever! You've got to get real. I mean, I agree that growth is a problem. But not all growth is bad. We want people to buy. We just want to change what it is that they're buying. Photovoltaics, insulation, warm clothes, decent housing, books and music, organic food. We have to live, Trevor. We have to eat and drink and have some sense of community.”

“We're not living, Hannah. We're consuming. There is a difference. We're parasites, an invasive species, gobbling up the planet! Munch, munch, munching away. And then spitting out enough CO
₂
to send us into oblivion. There will be no community if there is no world to put it on! What's it going to take for people to notice and begin to resist?”