“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said unto them, it is written, my house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.”
John 2:13-16
While at the top of Mount Ripinsky, climber C.J. Jones looked around for the clear, rock-bottomed pool between the mountain’s north and south peaks. She didn’t see it.
Since at least Sept. 14 and for possibly longer, the pool between the 3,900-foot summits has been dry. It was full in mid-June when I swam in it with friends, trying in vain to reach its bottom.
Jones has lived here 40 years. She can’t remember the pool ever drying up. For decades and possibly centuries, it was filled by a glacier that rested in the saddle between the two peaks, used sometimes by thirsty hikers to cool cans of warm beer. But the glacier melted away a year or two ago, leaving just residual water in the pool.
Now the pool’s gone, too.
A friend who ice-skated on it a few years back may have been the first and last person to have that experience.
It’s a common story for anyone familiar with our valley’s glaciers. They’re disappearing. “The boot,” a so-shaped patch of glacier, low-lying but tucked into a dark crevasse on the west flank of Chilkat Inlet near Pyramid Harbor, also has disappeared. Here at the edge of a giant rainforest water use was restricted for months in summer because our reservoir wasn’t engineered for unprecedented drought.
Snow-capped mountains and glaciers are what distinguish Alaska from the rest of the world. They’re our icons, like the eagle, moose and king salmon. Without them, our town’s landscape isn’t quite as majestic or mesmerizing.
Will the disappearance of glaciers make Alaskans or their elected representatives any more motivated to tackle the questions of global climate change? That’s unlikely. Accounts of polar bears drowning because of diminished polar sea ice didn’t budge the Alaska electorate, or our man in Congress, Don Young. We don’t give up old habits or old Congressmen quickly, or quickly enough.
We are a special kind of stupid. Just how special, we may find out. Like dinosaurs, we’re incapable of fully comprehending what’s happening around us, but are we also unable to learn, to change our behavior or to adapt?
This week, little Greta Thunberg of Sweden unleashed her fury on world leaders, outraged by their lack of action on climate change. She spoke the way we all should have been speaking years ago on any number of justice issues, from gun control to race relations to income inequality – with impatience for change.
She set an example.
To change the course of history and perhaps to save our species, we need to start acting and speaking directly, passionately, even angrily.
That’s difficult for many of the smart and humble people who are concerned about the future. They’re prone to humility. They tend toward doubt, even of themselves. They abide by the rules of civility and politeness in discourse. If they’re not okay with the money-changers being in the temple, they’re certainly not going to turn the tables on them.
But the truth may be that we’ve gone too far and waited too long to remain patient with our corrupted political system, and that we are too far gone to not wield anger and every other political tool within reach.
Our nation’s ruling class, blind to everything but wealth, has largely destroyed the middle class and the stairway to it. It’s becoming clearer every day that the rule of the rich also is destroying the fabric of life that sustains humanity.
For decades, a critical number of people have been okay with that equation, falsely believing in the Ponzi-scheme philosophy that if we ascribe to rich-man politics, one day we ourselves will be rich, and we’ll be able to buy our way around problems, like the rich do.
After nearly 40 years under this model, we’re starting to realize that’s not only a scheme, it’s a perilous one.
Thunberg is right. It’s time to call out the money-changers. While we’re at it, we must also throw them out of our temples of power. It’s what Jesus would do.