Global Warming Jump Rope

When LabKitty was a child -- insomuch as LabKitty was ever a child -- children played outside. Girls played jump rope , a sadistic ritual wherein two girls would suspend a catenary of rope between themselves, excite the rope's primary vibration mode via arm swinging doing, and then one or more additional participants would enter the system and attempt to make periodic jumping matched to its fundamental frequency so as not to disturb the standing wave formed by the rope. Ergo: "jump rope."

What I have left out of this charming tale is the songs the girls would sing as they made with the jumping. I vaguely remember them, the songs. Something about Ali Baba's thieves washing their face in gravy and worms playing pinochle on your snout. Harmless enough I suppose, crude stereotypes notwithstanding.

However, their songs frequently took a turn for the worse.

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Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks,
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one

Perhaps you recall the Lizzie Borden song. (Google the Mexican drug cartel's handiwork if you require a demonstration of the reality of axe murder.) And this is just one example of stark violence recurring in childrens' songs, jump rope and otherwise. Some Wikipedia searching turns up quite the tales of woe and carnage. Take Eeper Weeper, for example:

Eeper weeper,
Chimney sweeper
Had a wife,
But couldn't keep her.

Had another,
Didn't love her.
Up the chimney,
He did shove her.

It's as if jumping rope is designed to steel our youth to the horrors of the human condition through semantic satiation. Hey kids, one day you might be called upon to dispose of your wife's body so here's a cheerful little ditty that will help you cope until you're old enough to drink.

Lest I leave you with the impression that I am genuinely troubled by any of this, that I might be putting pen to editorial letter or on-hold with my congressman at this very moment, fear not . True, this sort of sing-song would give pause lilting from a character in a Steven King novel, but not so much from the Zugatti sisters who sat behind me in homeroom and whose parents had an auto parts store and always gave my dad a good price on parts for the Pinto station wagon I would one day drive to college.

I just find the whole thing supremely weird, is all.

Not to mention there is a long tradition of providing age-inappropriate material to the little tikes. From Greek chorus to brothers Grimm and otherwise who prepared our offspring for realpolitik in a time when getting taken by a bear or scarlet fever was a fact of childhood that the MPAA could not shield parents from. How silly it all seems in retrospect. Generations later most of us no longer fear the plague or the Huns. Yet, such luxury only persists as long as the social contract remains in effect, a nicety that in turn depends upon Nature behaving herself.

There is currently much hand wringing over the future of Dry Land in the coming climatic upheaval. The question has turned from "if" to "how bad?" and "who's going to get it in the neck?" Heck, even the Old Guard are coming around: it isn't true ok it is but humans aren't causing it ok we are but there's nothing we can do about it ok there is but conservation is for Europeans and homosexuals. It's like witnessing Vasco da Gama about to round the horn of Africa after spending half a career tacking against the northerly trade winds. (You'll know the circle is complete once we start hearing: "Why didn't the liberal eggheads warn us about this?" ) Still, what those Ivy League scientists and their differential "equations" are overlooking is the ability of humans to adapt and overcome. Three thousand years ago when a giant meteorite squashed the Yucatan, what did humans do? That's right: we unsaddled our dinosaurs, went inside, and made cave paintings in France until the whole thing blew over. Before you could say CT boundary, we're frescoing photo realistic naked chicks on the Sistine chapel while simultaneously not comprehending that when horses run they periodically become airborne, which now that I think about it is a telling commentary on the priorities of artists and I don't really have a problem with that.

When the oceans rise we might all grow gills who's to say? (Well, Mendel for one. Trust me, nobody's growing gills.) The point being is that it's one thing to look at the future through the dark glass of your SAS output and see no way forward, and something altogether different living it day-to-day, when each morning brings a new world of possibilities, or it had damn well better if you plan on eating.

But if history is any indicator, the unmerciful sun will shine unequally on young and old in the malarial collectives of Tomorrowland. Children -- resilient little bastards that they are -- seem to have the easiest time time adapting when things go off the rails. Think: Jim in Empire of the Sun or Tom in Tom Sawyer or Pip in Great Expectations. Russian children riding frozen corpses of Wehrmacht soldiers like sleds following the failed offensive of 1941 and Ring around the Rosie mocking the black plague, the latter apocrypha but persistent apocrypha because it's exactly what we expect of unfettered childhood id. Nobody write stories about the Adults of the Corn.

Taking a canoe to the sweat shop or waiting in line for your daily ration of nutrient paste will be business-as-usual if that's all you've ever known. It's the grown-ups, remembering an era of quaint things like "the food chain," who are going to have a bad time of it. No Country for Old Men ,indeed. A country of poor crops and broken infrastructure. A country bankrupt in every sense of the word. One wonders if there will be pilgrimages to Jim Inhofe's hometown that our descendants might exhume his corpse and properly thank it for the havoc his ilk is visiting upon them.

Yet, in that moist dystopia you can rest assured little girls will still be jumping rope. For fun, yes, but also because electricity will be reserved for the lucky few living in gated compounds. You ain't running no Suzy Bake Oven on oxen dung. Probably the little boys will join in too, as there will no longer be police cars to throw rocks at.

And as the kids jump rope, they will sing childhood songs of the new normal.

New York City, Washington
All gone back to swamps again
Gators ate up all of my friends
A dry spot's hard to find

Londoners have gone insane
Looking for the bloody drain
Oh dear boy it looks like rain
A dry spot's hard to find.

Tokyo is going blotto
Looking 'round at all this water-o
They say Hey! no ari-gato!
A dry spot's hard to find

Out in Kansas all they fear
As the ocean's growing near
Will the cows get scuba gear?
A dry spot's hard to find