I spoke to a woman and a man at the Post Office. They were both elderly, the man said he had lived in the area for 50 years and had never seen it snow so late in April in Eugene, Oregon. The woman, who was probably near her seventies said she was born and raised here. And that, to her memory, it has never been so cold this late in April. I asked her why she thought this was happening and she began to say "Global Warming" but could not remember the phrase. It was not an age related memory loss, just one of those things where you have only passing familiarity with an idea and so are not sure about its particulars.

Outside, I thought about how people with so much life experience and first hand knowledge—potentially the wisest in our communities—could see and experience such a massive shift in fundamental living conditions and have no understanding of it, and no way to contextualize it. Even in a culture where there is no technical or scientifically sound explanation to be had, elders can use mythology to explain, tales with a purpose. Stories intending to teach us how to act and how to see these changes, and what we ought prepare for, and how we ought feel about it.

But in our culture, the most powerful agents often work against our acquiring the knowledge that we have at hand as a People. They fear it might encroach upon their profits and their lifestyle. And so we are encouraged to be confused, and stupid, and rather than send a certain message with certain implications for lifestyle, morality, and behavior, we instead become mired in uncertainty. This is a manufactured uncertainty. And so, the manufacturers produce people who, en masse, watch the world change all about them, and cannot even pronounce someone else's name for what is happening.

So then I say we ought no longer wait for the scientists to break free of their political chains, or the government to once again remember its charge. It would make sense—just as giving up on our corrupt media sources makes good survival sense—we ought to simply consider that the weather shall continue to surprise, and will become less and less calm or reliable, and even increasingly hostile in areas or situations already fragile. Eventually, the climate will become outright dangerous in many places it never was before. Definitely, let us work in harmony with Mother Earth in the ways we choose, as well as fight the corporate chokehold on the planet and all the pollutants said parasitic relationship entails, but knowing these facts and no longer being in doubt about them, we ought to choose our action. Think long term. With the unconfused and unambiguous truth in the mind. Even if we do not move to places sure to remain more stable than others, we can prepare our descendants with the truth. They may choose to shape their lives or locale in light of that. And to the point of my story: accepting this, we ought invent our own tales for what is happening, and tell those tales to each other and to our children. Let us think them through and build them soundly, containing proper symbols, and moral lessons and cautionary notes and heroes and villains. We shall bypass the liars and the meddlers and the crooked and criminal misdirection they peddle. We shall build the new truthful reality from the ground up.

These new stories will be ours and tomorrow's truth, as the government and corporate controlled fables all end the same and never make the good guys look or sound or live like you and me. And worse yet, lead us off cliffs or into pens or into fugue states that last an entire lifetime, onto roofs, or under water while they tape us for TV News Snippet.