A LONG TIME AGO I USED TO POST MORE THAN ONCE A QUARTER: Global warming may well be a reality -- and based on just looking at the past 30 years, it's fact -- but articles like this make me wonder if all the shrill enviro-name-calling is just more politics, more of the left trying to claim the moral high ground rather than deal with reality. That said, there are clearly knee-jerks on the right who are equally guilty of head-in-the-sand, reactionary posturing. So...

...can't a whole bunch of us agree to be in the middle, trying to figure out what to do about real stuff?

Am reading a book called HAPPINESS right now, written by a Buddhist monk who happens to be the son of a recently departed, terribly influential French philosopher (which is neither here nor there). Anyway, the author relates a tale of a man who, called to summarize the whole of human history for a busy friend (who happens to rule the kingdom), after several tries comes up with: "They suffer."

That we will continue to suffer -- that the nature of man is to persevere, and yet to disintegrate, all at once -- is, to me, beyond dispute. That we are called to find compassion, to offer compassion to blunt the force of that suffering -- is equally apparent. What shape, compassion? What form, this anti-suffering?

Too much hand-wringing!