Home is Always Worth It
The first time I met what I have come to not-so-affectionately know as a “doomer dude” was in 2007. I was volunteering with a New York City-based lefty newspaper and still trying to fit my voice into a mold as a “real journalist” (in retrospect, I’m glad I never succeeded). The major news outlets were still covering their ears and mouths when it came to “global warming” as it was then derisively, controversially, dubiously known. But my little paper, The Indypendent, bravely decided to break the silence by dedicating its entire April issue to the crisis on the horizon.
Each month, we had these elaborate open-floor editorial meetings and this one drew a particular strain of peculiar volunteers out of the woodwork. I found myself surrounded by tall, white men with remarkable sunburns and disheveled hair and cargo pants who towered over me with tales of woe. “There’s really no point anymore. Humans are done for!” They said with glee. Perhaps as a consolation, they offered, “but don’t worry! The earth will be fine! She just needs to get rid of us!”
Their wistfulness was as perplexing as it was intimidating.
I was 23 and new to New York—still too young and too southern to know my way out of a man-splaining vortex. I nodded and smiled and cried the whole way home.
