Anger Management

Because insulting a kid is completely in line with "Be Best" principles when you are, yourself, a child in a senior citizen suit, this is one of Trump's many pissy Tweets this morning:

I guess he wanted to be the Person of the Year instead of getting articles of impeachment for Christmas.

Thunberg has responded with class:

 

UPDATE:  But yes, we should actually all be pretty angry, because the planet is pretty fucked.

Greta Thunberg is Time's POY

Opinions may differ, but I think the choice of Greta Thunberg for the Time Person of the Year works for me. She is young, but she doesn't come to play when it comes to her message--the planet is fucked unless we start getting serious about reversing what we are doing to it. 

It isn't doom-saying. It isn't apocalypse-fiction. She's deadly serious. The denialists are unseriously looking for silver linings in clouds that are actually the haze of wildfires.  They want to say that Thunberg's seriousness is her own fault, or that of her parents or "handlers". 

I don't think this young woman is being handled. I've written not long ago that it is the adults who want to feel affronted by her who are in need of getting a handle on themselves. It is certainly true that when she says her childhood was stolen from her, that she could have had it another way--that children exist today who don't notice or at least aren't obsessed or even moved by the gathering ecological dangers posed by the realities of the sixth extinction which we are now experiencing, and all because of human activity. 

Knowing something is funny, though. When one more than casually knows that ocean acidification could eventually choke out the oxygen we breathe here on land, it has an effect. When the ecosystems human life depend upon are eroding, it is hard to unknow that. She chose action. She wasn't handled into that--she chose.

She makes people uncomfortable because some have chosen not only not to act, but not to even really know--to try and find happy stories about how people are surviving climate disasters because we humans have adapted to adversity through technology, without understand the message that we alone do that, and other species cannot. And that we are connected to this other life on earth, and that the costs of our survival will mount. 

Her message is uncomfortable, but must be addressed.

Time Person of the Year: The Silence Breakers

Find out why the Silence Breakers were chosen as TIME's Person of the Year 2017 #TIMEPOY https://t.co/jOS7zksnw7

— TIME (@TIME) December 6, 2017

I think they got this exactly right. A quick look around at some of the stories and columns of the day tells why--

Weinstein's Complicity Machine : People went out of their way to cover up and abet a powerful Hollywood insider for years.

This editorial by Gretchen Carlson (who should have been profiled by Time, as having been the one to finally bring down Roger Ailes).

This disturbing story from a recent accuser of retiring Rep. John Conyers, who appears to have made a chilling threat demonstrating just one reason assault/harassment victims don't come forward.

A new account regarding Senator Al Franken, which demonstrates why even "Nice Guys" don't live up to expectations.

This allegation from Janet Porter, senatorial candidate Roy Moore's spokesperson, that his accusers are the real criminals, showing how even some women don't believe other women.

And there is so much more. It is horrible to know how many people have suffered abusive behavior in silence--it is good to see so many not being silent anymore.