All Hail the King!

This morning at breakfast my middle child, a 19-year-old soon-to-be-sophomore biology major, surprised me by announcing: "I searched your blog and found that you have not mentioned me. You haven't even mentioned that you have a son."

Actually, I haven't mentioned that I have two sons.

The older one will graduate from college in May of 09. If you happen to be the one who scores the Foreign Service Exam, I hope you take notice of him! He's named Josh, has an incomprehensible love of comparative politics, mad gaming skills, a certain aversion to dirt, and --by graduation day--experience working for the Canadian consulate. Not that Canada is all that foreign, but we in the Pacific Northwest love our neighbors to the north. Plus, they speak English and French. Like Josh.

Hopefully, if the ice age comes along in the next year, Josh's Canadian friends and colleagues will lend him a dog sled and teach him the finer points of trapping. It's not as exotic as Micronesian friends and colleagues or Canary Islander friends and colleagues or even Australian friends and colleagues. But it's practical. Like Josh.

Now, my other son is not known for his aversion to dirt. Or being practical. In fact, he's rather lofty and is known far and wide as King.

This is not his given name, of course. But his given name is one of those adrogonous names gone all girly. He hates it (or perhaps he hates his parents for saddling him with it), and has always gone by his middle name. But in a modern world, your first initial leaks out, and by second or third grade everyone wanted to know what his mysterious first initial, K, stood for.

"Simple," he would say, "It's King." Then he would humbly explain that he was sparing their dignity by not using his haughty moniker, and by middle school absolutely everyone--friends, neighbors, teachers, the mailman--everyone believed that we had named our first child Josh and our second child King. "My name is King Cole," he would declare, and no one would laugh or giggle or ask any questions.

Just for the record, he is not named King Cole, nor is he named King Kong, which might be more appropriate given his flair for the dramatic.

The King is extaordinarily gifted. He has an IQ of about 8,000 and a Midas touch that won't quit. And he's quite certain that global warming isn't real, or at least not worrisome, which is the real reason I haven't worked him into the blog until now (in case you're reading, my wunderkind).

He's making me read The Beak of the Finch so that I might learn just how we living organisms will adapt to a crisis such as climate change. But I'll confess: I don't really understand it.

Still, I find myself nearly persuaded each time I hear The King argue that polar bears will survive; after all, they have already begun to adapt. I'm not sure if he learned this in his evolutionary cellular biology class or because he attends the only university in the country to have a polar bear as a mascot.

And yet, for all his blustery objection to global warming propaganda, here he is, reading--searching, even--InnerNeanderthal. What else could a mother ask for? What else could a blogger ask for? My goal here is to stretch the limits of imagination, and clearly, I've captured some tiny corner of his.

As an adult educator, I am well aware that human beings can neither discuss nor act on anything that is beyond the boundary of our imagination. And we cannot imagine global warming.

Or more strictly, we cannot imagine how six, or at the most eight, degrees of warming will change our world. And since we cannot imagine, we cannot talk about what's coming or what we could realistically do to stop it.

We can, however, imagine how difficult it would be be to whittle all our possessions down to a short list we could pack and carry in a hurry. And that is the point of the exercise.

The King may be right. Maybe global warming is a natural phenomenon that has not been accelerated by humankind. I find this a bit unlikely. But also a bit irrelevant.

We should all radically change our behaviors right this minute, just to be sure. And certainly, The King and his brother Josh have been most cooperative in our family efforts to live a one-car life and to slash our electrical use.

But even if we cease to produce any more greenhouse gases tomorrow, global warming would continue...the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere need time to dissipate; they will continue to influence the weather until they're gone.

And so, it is most likely that we will see climatic catastrophes for decades to come.

It seems to me that it is time for all of us--skeptics and saints--to shine a little light on the corner of our imagination and talk about what we're going to do about the impending reality, regardless of its ultimate cause.

Perhaps, in the end, The King knows that his mother is right. Perhaps that's the real reason he's searching for his Inner Neanderthal!