Written by Zepp Jamieson   

Solstice 2015
The New Normals

© December 21st, 2015
Bryan Zepp Jamieson

We have a forecast for our area here in the southern end of the Cascades for bunches of rain and snow as far as the eye can see. Maybe until May. Since meteorology is the science of trying to unconvolute the hopelessly convoluted, that means wet and cold, likely for five days, probably for seven, possibly for ten.
Beyond that...well, an honest weatherman will shrug, grin a stochastic grin, and tell you he has a pretty good idea when sunrise and sunset will be on a given date, and what phase the moon will be in. The weather? Well, yes, there will certainly be weather. Anything else I can help you with?
I'm not complaining, you understand. We've been in a horrible drought, and over the past 35 months our ski resort village has experienced the utter weirdness of no winter. In a normal year, we sometimes have days in January or February when it gets up to 10 or 15 C above zero, and it's sunny, and everyone gets outside and enjoys it. But when it happens day after day after day, and the ski park has nothing but bare dirt in February, everyone gets very uneasy.
At least it did shut up the local climate deniers—there's that to be said for it.
This year it appears that winter has finally returned, and it's going to be cold and miserable and as Yeats would have it, “Everything outside us is mad as the mist and snow.” Pure Scots' joy.
When the forecast is crappy (ok, happy/crappy) like this one, I have a habit of poking my nose into the Canadian Weather net and seeing how things are going in my old hometown of Ottawa. Weather reports like “Minus twenty, with blowing and drifting snow” aren't uncommon, and I immediately feel better because I don't live in Ottawa. So I poked my nose in to see what sort of suffering my old friends and neighbours were enjoying.
“Zero and partly cloudy.”
Huh. About the same as it is here. Well, even Ottawa gets breaks from winter. Sometimes as early as April. This seemed warm for them, but not record shattering.
Then I remembered; our warm non-winter moved east this year due to El Niño conditions, with the result that places like New York and Chicago were enjoying shirt sleeve winter. “Well, lucky you, Ottawa” I muttered in tones usually reserved for Giants fans in the area after their team have swept my Dodgers.
The Canadian weather page had a newsfeed story. Apparently there's a widespread rumor that due to some unspecified “astronomical occurrence between Mars and Jupiter”, the Earth would be plunging into darkness for 8 days, starting December 16th.
OK, you're reading this on the 21st or sometime after that. So if we plunge into darkness on the 16th, don't bother emailing me to tell me I was wrong. After five days of darkness, it would have occurred to me to open my front door and check to make sure the house wasn't completely buried in snow again.
Of course, by day five of the 8-day night, civilization would have collapsed, cities would be in flame, people would be screaming and setting fire to universities and hospitals because it turns out Jesus hates iPhone6es, and the damn email will be down.
Oh yeah—and after five days of absolutely no sunlight, the Great Lakes should be frozen over, freezing temperatures would have killed all the vegetation in Florida, and Ottawa's weather will have returned to normal. But nobody would be talking about global warming.
Worst of all, I would have to tear up this Solstice piece and rewrite it. I gotta admit, the rewrite would be a helluva good one.
Eight days of darkness, caused by something vague happening in a part of the solar system that, by a simple law of location, cannot affect the amount of sunlight reaching Earth.
Hoo boy.
I remembered the first time the “Mars is going to swoop by the Earth and look bigger than the Moon” rumor made the rounds on the net. Even Bartcop, who was a scary smart dude, fell for that one. I started a counter-rumor that the Moon would pass within a quarter million miles of Earth and look bigger than Mars from the Earth's surface. Some people thought this was an interesting and disturbing change in cosmology.
Then a little poll on the page caught my eye. A town called Woodland, in North Carolina, had banned solar panels. Why did they do this?
The three answers I was to choose from were a) they were unsightly b) they were too noisy and c) they would suck up all the sun's power.
OK, I thought, let's finesse this. “They were unsightly” is the only sensible answer. It's also the least newsworthy. If a council in North Carolina had rejected solar panels as unsightly, it wouldn't end up as a clickbait poll on a Canadian weather page.
“Suck up all the sun's power”. Um, no. Just no. Canadians like to make jokes about the dumb things Americans do and say, and everyone, including Americans, like to pile on the South for their occasional acts of sheer idiocy. But nobody could possibly be that dumb.
That left the option that they were too noisy. Anyone who has ever seen a solar panel knows that they are silent. On a windy day they might creak and groan in their frames a bit, but that's about it. But it's the only answer that would a) merit a poll and b) make it sound like the residents of North Carolina need to be encased in a big padded capsule of Valium and shipped off to the nearest giggle academy.
The correct answer was C. The council, on a 3-1 vote, was afraid the panels would suck up all the sun's power. Jane Mann, apparently a retired science teacher – yes, that's right, a retired science teacher – told the council that solar panels prevent photosynthesis somehow, and keep plants from growing. Well, that's true, if certain plants happen to be underneath the panels, and in their shade.
She also expressed concerns over cancer because anything new and different causes cancer.
Another Mann named Bobby provided the line about sucking up the sun's power. That would really be something to see.
I hope Bobby and Jane aren't married, and if they are, I hope they don't reproduce.
When I stopped pounding my head violently on my desk, I looked to see how other respondents on the poll did. 46% picked “they were unsightly.” I bet they did rotten on multiple-choice tests. You never go for the plain, simple answer!
Only 2% picked “too noisy.” Large parts of Canada are where in the winter solar panels and photosynthesis are both moot points, and for that matter, eight days – or more – of darkness is just a normal part of the climate around the winter solstice. And even they all knew that solar panels are silent.
The rest pretty much had the residents of Woodland sussed out. The officials in Woodland are what “Bob Dobbs” of the Church of the SubGenius called “the Normals.” As Bob explains, “You how how dumb people with an IQ of 100 are? By definition, half the people are dumber than that!”
The Normals.
All this brings me to the subject of elections, logically or otherwise. Canada had one back in October. It was a three way race. You had the incumbent Conservatives, who were increasingly fascist, and intended to turn Canada into a corporatocracy. They were widely hated. There was the New Democratic Party, democratic socialists who started the campaign two months (yes, months) earlier with a large lead. I was thrilled, since I've been an NDP supporter since I was 14, and they've never won a federal election. They had just taken power in the deeply right-wing oil province of Alberta, and I dared to hope.
Canadians weren't quite ready for that big a change, though, and in the end, split the baby and elected the Liberals, a milquetoast centrist party. The Liberals are similar to America's Democratic Party, whose motto is “Because we're not as bad as the Republicans.” The Liberal's main appeal was the party leader, Justin Trudeau, who was the photogenic son of Canada's most famous Prime Minister.
American Democrats face a similar situation. They have a choice between a democratic socialist and two weak centrists, with the only other options being the menagerie of Dead Clowns Walking in the far-right Republican party.
If I could wave a magic wand, Bernie Sanders would be president tomorrow. America needs someone thoughtful, humane, intelligent and honest, and Sanders seems to fill the bill.
Ah, but he's running against a “Normal” who thinks $12 an hour is a decent wage and that impoverished single moms can benefit from getting rebates on taxes they don't even pay for child care. She is even similar to Trudeau in that she had a family member in the top office even more recently. Bob Dobbs would look at Hillary Clinton and mutter, “When I said 'Pull the wool over your own eyes', I was making a joke, Democrats!”
Remember when we thought Republicans were cold-hearted bastards who mocked poor young single moms by offering them tax breaks?
Then there are those Republicans. Most of them don't believe evolution is real. Nearly all of them deny that climate change is man-made and happening. Most of them profess to believe the absurd fable of Noah's Ark is literally true. They all believe government people like Jimmy Carter are immoral and can't be trusted, but that business people like Martin Shkreli or Carli Fiorini or Donald Trump are moral and can be trusted because, you know, Ayn Rand.
Meet the new Normals.
There's a lot of new Normals out there. They believe that solar panels suck up all the sun light, and that there is an eight day night coming.
They threaten us all with a more permanent night.
But it is the winter solstice. It is the time when we begin to push back against the night. We do so, knowing the sun must return. We don't just believe it will; we know it will. Science, you know.
There's a lot of Normals out there. Don't let them Normalize our lives.
Don't lose hope. Never lose hope.
Have a happy Solstice.