The Sky Is Yellow

I wake up, and the sky is yellow.

Not the orange or rust or outright brown of some places, where the smoke is worse; not yet, anyway. Just a hazy, thick yellow that reminds me of what it was like growing up, when every city had that haze hovering over it. When some days you couldn’t see the horizon—no, you couldn’t even see six or eight blocks away clearly. 

It used to be smoke everywhere, all the time, like living inside a smoking section in a restaurant, a thing that used to exist but we legislated to remove. Like how we wrote the Clean Air Act. Like how we worked against acid rain. Like how we came together to repair the hole in the ozone layer. Like how we started the shift to electric and hybrid vehicles. 

Like all these progressive moves we undertook to fight back against the damage that the industrial age imposed upon us because rich people were more concerned with fancy advances and making money over growth in a way that protected and enhanced the lives of the common people. 

Which sounds familiar. 

I remember back in 2012, watching The History Channel’s The Men Who Built America, uncomfortable all the way through it. It’s been criticized as a simplified version of events, cornily reenacted, with no new information. Oh, and for having Donald Trump as one of the experts interviewed. [read the Wikipedia article to see the details, I’m just summarizing.] As someone who didn’t grow up reading much about a bunch of rich men who threw their influence around in order to make even more money and gather power, I found the comparison to what was happening at the time, seen through my eyes as a more experienced adult, chilling.

I was not wrong to make those comparisons. Look at where we are now. I saw it coming, though not to this extent. Not to where we rolled back everything. Not to yellow skies.

We fixed this before, or at least were on our way to fixing things. So what do we do now? There are choices we need to make. 

Do we want to be ruled by a small circle of billionaires who only care about their own personal enrichment, even if it destroys everything else? Do we want to have to mask up in order to leave the house, hope and pray that the water we’re drinking, cooking with, bathing in, watering our food supply is uncontaminated? Are we going to stand here while they kill off anyone they think of as disposable or undesirable?

 

There are choices we need to make.