Here’s the truth of it: after all these years, today I don’t know what to write about.

I mean, in this ever-stranger world of ours, where even to start?

Oh, wait, give me a second and I’ll be right back! I don’t want to miss the latest ads featuring our president, paid for with millions of our tax dollars. It’s obviously important to check them out since, as he told us recently, “I’m not promoting myself because I’m not running for office. I’m promoting the country.” And who wouldn’t want him to reassure us about the state of this fair land of ours?

As he put it in one of those ads, “America will never be a communist country.” Whew! Who among us wasn’t worried about that!

Oops, and here I am again! It certainly seems as if my country (though, in truth, it doesn’t exactly feel like mine anymore) is now, to use a classic phrase, distinctly up shit’s creek without a paddle -- unless you consider Donald Trump a paddle. If so, there’s little question, of course, that he’s paddling us all to hell and back. And mind you, as I was writing this, the latest polls of voters for the upcoming November elections suggested that I wasn’t alone in thinking such thoughts. A surprising number of Americans, even ones who once voted for him (yes, him!), are now clearly worried that “our” president has put us on that very pathway to hell and, worse yet, the “and back” in that phrase (”to hell and back”) might no longer apply to this all-American world of ours.

Even more strikingly, we are evidently on a planet that, in terms of habitability -- from the historic (or do I mean ahistorical?) El Niño now developing in the Pacific Ocean to heat, drought, fire, you name it -- seems to be going down, down, down, again without a paddle in sight. We are, of course, living in an ever-hotter new world (and not faintly in the ancient all-American sense that the phrase “new world” once had). After all, with record seasonal heat from Europe to North America and distinctly beyond, we humans (not to speak of alligators, elephants, penguins, and turtles) are clearly living on a different planet in a fashion that should seem all too devastating to so many more of us than it evidently yet does.

Just consider it good luck that you and I aren’t polar bears living in a distinctly (yes, that word again!) heating Arctic -- its sea ice having “shrunk by nearly half a million square kilometers per decade since 1979, equivalent to losing an area the size of Spain every 10 years.” In fact, congratulate yourself if you’re not living in the Swiss Alps, where glaciers have lost nearly one-fifth of their volume over -- no, not the past half-century but the last five years! -- and between July and September of this year alone, around an additional 2.2 trillion liters of water. Oh, and it’s not just on land either. After all, “more than 90% of emperor penguin colonies could be near extinction by 2100 if sea ice loss persists at its current rate.”

Of course, in such a world, it won’t necessarily just be animals potentially going extinct but, perhaps somewhere down the line, we humans, too. (Okay, you’re right! We are indeed “animals.” I certainly didn’t mean to argue with you about that!)

Donald Trump Is Doing His Damnedest to Take Us All Down with Him

Although all of what I cited above represents the latest news and figures I could find, none of it should really surprise us. After all, it shouldn’t have been hard to learn that such a world was on the way,........

© Common Dreams