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No Lives Matter: Will the last gender studies professor welcoming the last gay student to the last safe space college catering to sensitive transgender students learning to write code and dreaming of startups please turn out the lights?

No Lives Matter: Will the last gender studies professor welcoming the last gay student to the last safe space college catering to sensitive transgender students learning to write code and dreaming of startups please turn out the lights?

Last updated on: November 21, 2016 at 9:41 am by Frank Schaeffer

No Lives Matter: Will the last gender studies professor welcoming the last gay student to the last safe space college catering to sensitive transgender students learning to write code and dreaming of startups please turn out the lights? 2016-11-21T09:41:22-07:00 Frank Schaeffer

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We are facing the most important question in human history and it’s not about Jesus, abortion rights, women, Black Lives Matter, Facebook or gay rights. It is about whether organized human life will survive in any recognizable form called civilization. Do you feel your brain shutting down as you read these words? Just keep your brain working a few more seconds. Tell your brain to shut up and read the rest of this.

Because we’ve let our brains mess with us (I’ll explain in a moment) we’re accelerating the race to irreversible disaster. This truth cannot be spun. And Black Lives Matter, the “Alt-Right,” mass incarceration, who gets to use what bathroom, religious freedom, abortion rights, Islamic terrorism, feminism, marriage equality… all become moot in the face of the ultimate threat. Sorry everyone.

On November 8, we Americans set our stamp on the future. The outcome of our election placed total control of the government— executive, Congress, the Supreme Court—in the hands of the Republican Party and the Republican Party is in the hands of climate change deniers.

The Republican Party (in the words of Noam Chomsky) “has become the most dangerous organization in world history…. The party is dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organized human life. There is no historical precedent for such a stand.”

Chomsky rightly notes that:

The most important news of November 8 was barely noted, a fact of some significance in itself…. On November 8, the World Meteorological Organization delivered a report at the international conference on climate change in Morocco… [and] reported that the past five years were the hottest on record. It reported rising sea levels, soon to increase as a result of the unexpectedly rapid melting of polar ice, most ominously the huge Antarctic glaciers. Already, Arctic sea ice over the past five years is 28 percent below the average of the previous 29 years, not only raising sea levels, but also reducing the cooling effect of polar ice reflection of solar rays, thereby accelerating the grim effects of global warming…

Trump will destroy the Environmental Protection Agency. And Trump will back out of all climate agreements. Those are the biggest news events the world has ever known. These headlines are (as it were) bigger than Pearl Harbor back when or what happens to Israel, or to Muslims, to America or to human rights post-Trump’s election. By comparison nothing else matters.

Trump’s placing the EPA “transition” in the charge of the notorious (arrogant fool) climate change denier, Myron Ebell. Trump’s top adviser on energy — billionaire oil executive Harold Hamm — announced his expectations: dismantling regulations, tax cuts for the coal industry and more fossil fuel production…

In terms of our fate that’s bigger news than the Holocaust. It’s bigger news than anything Jesus ever said. It is all that matters now with the exception of preventing nuclear war. By comparison who has sex with whom, who rapes whom, who murders whom, fair trade coffee and an increase in the minimum wage are trivialities.

How did we get here?

The Republican Party has betrayed us because they will not help us to recognize the way that our brains work. The Democratic Party betrayed us too– by talking about everything BUT climate change. The Democratic Party too will not help us to recognize the way that our brains work. The Republicans and Democratic Party both cater to our most frightening evolutionary flaw: Our brains always look for short-term gain. We do not easily “see” long-term risk. Thus one party denies climate change while the other party is mired in identity politics that drown out consideration of the only really big question we face.

Talk of “glass ceilings” we can handle, extinction, not so much. Short-run solutions to immediate problems is what we crave. Our minds evolved to handle immediate problems like “Is there a saber-tooth tiger out there?” or “What should we do about capital punishment?” or “Who gets to use the transgender bathroom?” or “Can I open carry my gun?”

What we don’t do so well is ask: “What does this matter if the saber-tooth tiger, my gun and the transgender bathroom are all going to be under water in twenty years from now?”

We didn’t evolve the capacity to think about whether we might destroy the planet by keeping ourselves cool in summer and warm in winter. That was not an immediate risk. Our nervous system is tuned for now, not then. This is so true that people who talk about “then” are hated. Our lizard brains would rather watch porn as it were… or talk about workplace gender equality…

Our anti-intellectual brains are about to pay for being proudly “now” orientated and thus terminally stupid. The juxtaposition of the “real America” (down home folks) with “elitist America” (anyone who can complete a slightly complex sentence in English) exposes the actual meaning of all the endless denunciations of the elite that just won Trump the presidency.

As Richard Hofstadter said in “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” many Americans reflexively distrust anyone who demonstrates expertise or excellence in analytical intelligence.

The effects of anti-intellectual Republican climate change denial are rooted in an anti-intellectualism that means that our life on our planet as we know it will die. Period. This isn’t a theory. This is a fact. The most powerful nation in human history just voted for the party of extinction– the Republican Party.

The Right fiddles as Rome burns… but so does the Left. Will the last gender studies professor welcoming the last gay student to the last safe space college catering to sensitive transgender students interested in justice issues please turn out the lights?

There’s no wiggle room here. The human race — via the Republican Party lobotomizing the most powerful nation on earth — is about to learn the difference between the pressing concerns of say the women running the women’s studies program at your local college, what to “do” about ISIS, worries about voter suppression, gun “rights,” mass incarceration and deportation of undocumented workers… and actual survival.

Liberals had better learn that identity politics and human rights won’t mean much as the planet dies. And the white evangelical right will find that gun ownership and/or prayer meetings will not hold back the warming and dying oceans.

Too bad that during the election Democrats mostly talked about everything– from Trump’s groping women to what happens to Muslims if they are radicalized, to wanting to “unite the country” whatever that means — but rarely mentioned the only truly existential threat (nuclear war aside) of our time: Man-Made Climate Change.

We are about to meet a truly equal opportunity Apocalypse and it’s not going to matter what your point of view is on anything else. What’s on Netflix and a new dating app you like won’t save you. Gender issues? Won’t matter. Race? Same.

In the age of Google and Facebook “making the world a better place” we got Trump. Message to Silicon Valley “Innovators”: shut up now. You are part of the problem, not the solution… to anything that is besides increasing your own bank accounts and delusional egos. Disruption is bullshit. It’s done nothing for us. With you guys we now have the worst situation humankind ever faced and the worst president-elect ever. With you guys we have a pacified population hooked on your tech devices. Many didn’t even bother to vote. So much for engagement.

To Mother Earth, no lives matter. There’s only one fight that counts now: the Republican Party’s planned gang rape of the planet must be stopped and then reversed. The only question that matters now is this: What’s Plan B for destroying the Trumped Republican Party– before it kills us all?

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P.S. If you want to know a little more about where I’m coming from and my perspective on politics, religion and the intersection of faith and life– here’s a new movie about me. (It’s below the poster on YouTube) scroll down and watch it for free…

WATCH “Let me be FRANK” HERE:

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Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace

Available now on Amazon

Please read about my journey through then out of the religious right and Republican Party.

Buy it HERE
https://www.amazon.com/Crazy-God-Helped-Relig…/…/ref=sr_1_1…

Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

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