Let’s face it:

By the time your doctor tells you that you’re riddled with lung cancer and termites, you’ve already probably made a lot of unhealthy life choices, for years on end.

By the time the bill collector is camped outside your bushes at night with a miner’s light, you’ve likely been leaving piles of ‘urgent’ envelopes unopened somewhere in the den, for many months.

And by the time 99% of the world’s scientists tell you that you are contributing to a highly imminent, irreversible  global environmental meltdown, odds are  that you’ve been living off of the fumes of an unsustainable lifestyle for several decades.

My father is a charming, loving southern man with a streak of individualism that would make Ayn Rand blush.  He’s been married–and divorced– four times, to four different women. In each case, the relationship started out with a bang — but gradually devolved as the women starting to impede on his free time with demands that he attend ‘craft shows’ and such on his much cherished football Sundays.

Funny thing is that he never got into fights with these women.  No big dramas or screeching  tirades.   The whole break-up process was really rather simple:  one day I’d show up from school and be informed that things just didn’t work out.

Now a confirmed bachelor of 66 years, my father is a jazz loving free spirit with an amusing (sometimes perplexing) combination of  curiosity and  cynicism about his life.

A few years back he was washing his truck.  He was standing on the bumper with a mop, swiping it back and forth over the topper, when he lost his footing and slipped.  Funny thing happened on the way to the pavement — as he plummeted  down he was stopped mid fall by a knifey metal protuberance.  The truck bed handle was pointed upwards, and was perfectly poised to catch my dad’s groin.

And so there he hung, feet dangling slightly above ground level, with a metal truck bed handle lodged in his testicles.

Fortunately they don’t make American cars like they used to. The metal handle couldn’t support his full weight. After a minute or so it cracked off the car, and my dad continued his journey toward the cement, landing foot first in a bucket of soapy brown water.

On the ground.  Groin aching.  Laying in suds, my dad had a choice to make:  do I check out my goodies and make sure they’re still attached, or do I finish washing my car?

He  finished washing his car.

Now I’m pleased to say that eventually he mustered the courage to look downstairs, and he found all of his pieces in tact, if not a little bit swollen.  Sure, he’ll never breed again, but given his challenges with women  that’s probably not such a terrible thing.

But that’s not the point.

The point is this — through most of the last decade we as a country were helplessly impaled by the balls of our own denial about the realities of climate change.  By the time awareness kicked in, we were laying in the soapy suds of  indecision, terrified but disempowered by the sheer magnitude of the threat.

But now the time has come to put away childish things and look at our  gonads directly.  If we do so, I believe we’ll find that there’s  yet no  wounds that time and ingenuity cannot heal.

Clearly, I can’t tell you what your  own role is in the new sustainable world that is unfolding.

But I can tell you this — the writing has been on the wall for decades.

Our parents — god love them — are not going to guide us through this mess.

It’s time to step up and stake your claim to a world worth living in.

It’s an exciting decade for change, and for those of us willing to disconnect from the opium of blame and self-righteousness, the opportunities for prosperity and purpose are positively infinite.

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