Got to class five minutes before it started and the classroom was EMPTY. For a moment, I was in a reality tailspin, the sort of thing where if it was a TV show, there would be high pitched string glissandos and the camera would zoom in and out rapidly.

Obviously, I then sat down and tried to figure out what was going on, or as my extremely neurotic mind phrased it, “oh God, did everyone know there was no class today but me?”

The really sad part is how plausible a scenario that is. Being congenitally clueless is a rough, rough road.

Fortunately, another student showed up before I could finalize plans to figure out how to get an fMRI to find out exactly what part of my brain was broken.

Even if it turned out to be inoperable, I would still prefer to know.

Instead, we were split into two teams and made to debate “Climate Change : Reform, or Revolution?”. And I ended up on the “Reform” side.

And that pissed me off at first because I think it’s too late form reform and only revolution can save us. But once me and my team started talking about it, I realized that if you define reform as working within the system and revolution as working outside the system, I am a total Reformer.

Which is more in line with how I usually think anyhow. Revolution is too imprecise a word, and carries a lot of baggage like an association with anger, violence, and dogmatism with it.

I’m a reformer, and my heroes are reformers. They wanted to improve the system, not destroy it. Even my hero Martin Luther did not set out to destroy Catholicism. He wanted to reform it. He wanted it to return it to being what it said it was as opposed to what it really was.

And me, I want to make politicians actually put the environmentalism they all say they believe in into actual concrete action.

And not bullshit like that conference in Paris. Fuck that shit, that’s just kabuki theater. It’s twelve days of looking like you are Doing Something about the environment and global warming. They will talk, they will discuss, then will debate. And it will convince most of the people there, especially the liberal intellectuals who work in the professional environmentalism industry, that they have really done something and made a lot of progress on many important issues, and reached a real understanding that something must be done and it must be done soon.

Which is exactly what everyone thought before the damned thing even started. And people like the Koch brothers will not feel even slightly threatened because they know absolutely nothing will have been accomplished and nothing, absolutely nothing, will change.

Oh, and it absolutely does not matter that there will be no protests at this conference because of the Paris attacks, although the paranoid schizoid in me wonders if our sociopathic oligarchs would be capable of engineering a brutal terrorist attack just to keep those pesky protesters away.

No, it doesn’t matter because protests don’t matter. Protests are total bullshit and have been for at least a decade. These people, the high muck a mucks, expect there to be protesters wherever they go. It is totally normal for them and therefore means nothing to them. It’s just the usual background noise.

What is worse, these pricks and bitches have managed to get laws passed that completely violated the letter and the spirit of freedom of speech by banning protesters from coming anywhere near close enough to even inconvenience them in the slightest.

Honestly, I imagine that among the top 1 percent, you’re simply not ANYbody unless you’ve been protested.

In the modern day, protests have about as much of a chance of having an effect as a rain dance. And like rain dances, they furnish people with the illusion that they are doing something without actually having the slightest effect on anything.

The only difference is that by pure dumb luck, occasionally, it rains. That is enough to keep the idea that rain dances work alive.

Protests don’t work and haven’t worked since the powers that be made sure that they would never, ever, ever have to pass through a line of protesters ever again. But people continue to perform this ancient ritual because it makes them feel like they are “doing something” without asking much of them.

Oh, the party is in front of some office building? Cool. I guess we’re protesting something.

So yeah…. it occurred to me today that by some measures, I have become a lot more cynical over time. I don’t see it that way, of course. I see it as my understanding the world better and better.

But when I was sharing this stuff with my debate partners, all of whom are fresh faced youth new to the whole thinking about politics thing, I did feel a stab of guilt. Like I was taking their innocence away on some level. And I can justify it by saying “it’s better that they know the truth so they can direct their efforts towards things that might actually make a difference”, but I dunno.

That sounds sort of like something a self-justifying dickwad would say after he pops some kid’s balloon.

So I dunno. I have said before that spending a lot of time by yourself can lead to having no idea how your opinions might sound to someone else, or how harsh and uncompromising you might sound expressing them.

Things grow strange in the dark.

Then again, these are not the Occupy kids, who clearly thought that just by making it clear that they didn’t approve of something and it upset them they would change it. These kids are the more pragmatic crop of Millennials, who like things like fact-checking and results based approaches.

So maybe I didn’t say anything to them that they hadn’t thought themselves, and I am feeling guilty for no reason at all.

How typical for a liberal!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.