By Rev. Robert Plaisted

Guest Columnist

Did you hear the one about the folks who went through the desert on a horse with no name, because they wanted to get out of the rain? Bad decision. They went looking for a burning man, but they found a torrential downpour and a big mud hole, courtesy of climate change. Maybe, they’ll rename it the Muddy Man Festival.

I’m not ridiculing hapless people who get stuck in the mud. I’m asking the question, “How many more fiascos will it take before people understand that things change constantly, but they never change back?” In our previous climatic era, dry weather in the Nevada desert in early September would have been a sure thing. But our previous climatic era is over. Mud holes now await us, where once the desert baked.

That’s the fundamental mistake made by all right-wing zealots — religious dogmatists, political reactionaries, and everyone in America who congregates around the misnomer, “conservatives.” The past cannot be conserved. Time moves in one direction only. All attempts to drag humanity backward to some mythical “golden age” are doomed to fail. Despite the cheerful assertion, that “everything old is new again,” in the real world, everything old stays old forever.

Cosmologist Marina Cortes explained it thus: “The past is different from the future. That is the most basic knowledge we have in cosmology. The arrow of time is the most fundamental property of reality.” She was commenting on the absurd defense by lawyers for MAGA-GUY, who tried to justify the fraud he committed by inflating the value of his properties, then saying the properties eventually reached that value. The judge called his thinking a “fantasy world.” Climate denialists also live in a fantasy world. They defend their cherished delusions, simply because they’re cherished, not because they’re true.

Denialists search frantically for something — anything — to buttress their beliefs. We’re told to read crackpot websites like “The Epoch Times.” Whatever “epoch” these guys are talking about, it’s not the one we’re living through. We can check out those sites without believing the trash they publish. When denialists start citing facts about the climate crisis from respected, peer-reviewed sources, I’ll pay attention to them. That’s unlikely to happen in my lifetime.

People like me offer facts; they offer denial of facts. In MAGA world, nothing is true unless their great esteemed leader says so. Everything else is a witch-hunt, a conspiracy, a commie plot to overturn capitalism. Life on the far right must feel threatening these days. It’s gotta be tough, living in a world where every climate disaster — fires, floods, droughts, famines, uncontrollable mass migration — must be explained away as a sinister leftist plot, liberal extremism, or some other scapegoat.

Denying reality is tough. Nature is unrelenting. No matter how much vitriol and falsehood denialists throw around, it accomplishes nothing. Wildfires, floods, droughts, famines and millions of people fleeing them all, just continue. A time of reckoning is coming for the oil-soaked moguls who have brought our world to this place through their greed and folly. Whether or not human civilization will survive this collision between human delusions and nature’s intractable truth — that’s a question which probably won’t be answered before I draw my final breath. But, that doesn’t matter.

It’ll be answered soon enough, within the lifetimes of most people living today, including my children and grandchildren. Old guys like me tell the truth in the face of abusive criticism, not for our own sakes, but for theirs.

Rev. Robert Plaisted is a retired United Methodist clergyman, formerly of Bridgton and Bath, now residing in Auburn.