The Wages of Tunnel Vision is Ignorance

 

cicada corpse "mulch"

Many of us who live in the belly of the Midwest – Indiana and Ohio, to be exact – are well aware of the emergence of Brood X of the 17-year cicadas. Mercy, are we aware! In some parts of town, the dead insects are so thick on the ground under the larger trees that the accumulated bodies look like brown mulch. I kid you not... and yet the buzzy little guys aren't everywhere: I was in a part of town just yesterday where nary a buzz or whirr was to be heard, and I wasn't constantly dive-bombed by bugs the size of a wine-bottle cork.

Ain't nature great?! Whatever the case, apparently some people don't believe that there's a "cicada emergence" happening right now. Yup, some bobble-head wrote to the local newspaper and opined, 

"Been hearing about the Cicadas brood for the last 60 days. So far — nada. Kind of like our weather reports. Lots of hype, then nothing."

So this man (or woman; no one ever said all idiots are male) doesn't think the cicada emergence is real because he hasn't seen any. Well, he's welcome to visit my local park...

That failure of logic puts me in mind of a certain segment of our population who think that what they can't see doesn't exist. You know exactly who I'm talking about: the moron who declaims that there's no such thing as "global warming" because it was so damned cold here last week. The fact that people in the know discuss global climate change instead of global warming notwithstanding, let's take a look at just how tiny the guy's window on the world really is. We'll use the state of Indiana for an example. 

Indiana has a total area of 36,418 square miles. In terms of the rest of the world, that's

• 1.17% of the surface area of the "lower 48"
• 0.38% of the surface area of North America
• 0.064% of Earth's land surface area
• 0.018% of Earth's total surface area.

And this guy thinks that because it was cold in his back yard in February, that the rest of the globe was also cold?

Will someone please buy this jackass a clue?

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