 Reality Drought
As members of our staff travelled back from last weekend's grand opening of The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, their travels took them through the middle of a war zone - or at least what seemed like a war zone - in the heart of America's farmland.
In a time of year not usually known for dramatic weather, more than 70 tornados touched down in Illinois and Indiana on Sunday, killing at least six, turning upside down the lives of thousands, and delaying our staff a bit. This is just the latest weather disaster in a year that's seen one of the strongest tornados ever on record in Moore, Oklahoma, and one of the strongest hurricanes on record in Typhoon Haiyan. Like most recent years, 2013 is also likely to go down as one of the hottest years on record.
If you haven't heard much more than a day's worth of news on any of these climate change disasters, we're not surprised. Much of the media's chattering classes have been hyperventilating on their own hype, acting like a horde of Chicken Littles falsely claiming every problem President Obama runs into is his version of President Bush's Katrina failures. Still other large portions of our American media are busily airing the umpteenth homage and/or conspiracy theory about the death of President Kennedy, fifty years ago this week, while steadily ignoring the cause of all the weather-related death and destruction.
Much of America, sadly, tends to agree with what the vapid media executives shove in front of viewers, caring more about football and conspiratorial fantasies about their Presidents (both past and current), than they do about the reason for all the wild weather - climate change.
Thankfully, not all of America is sitting on the couch, waiting for the Hooters halftime show...
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