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Open letter to President Obama
Will you challenge climate change?
Dear President Obama,
It has been a year of dreams for you so far. Your face flickers on every cable channel, has graced the front pages of millions of newspapers and been plastered onto billboards and buses. Your name has been mumbled from everybody’s lips, echoed through microphones, aired over radio. Don’t worry, you don’t intimidate me, I am not worried by your accelerated rise to fame. Your presence does not threaten me nor budge me an inch from my comfort zone. I rest assured that I will always be more powerful, better known than you. I have touched more people’s lives and shaken hands with every member of the globe who I manage to meet with every single day.
Unlike commuters to work, who sit idly and impatiently in traffic jams, tapping their fingers on the dashboard, honking their horns and swearing under their breath, the corners of my thin black lips curl into a smile each morning at rush hour. My eyelids close in ecstasy as I inhale my favourite perfumes of nitrogen oxides and sulphur oxide, a bouquet of my favourite scents. But it is the little extras that are my luxurious treats, the dark puffs from the poorly maintained engines. The lead that is spit from those grey dusty exhausts is the cherry on my cake.
I am the black dancing vapour that circles the long factory chutes, that hovers over bonfires, twirls around chimneys and pirouettes along the fireplace. The coal is my mother; turf is my father, peat and oil my sisters. We are connected, we are one and they fill me with the fuel that I need. I am eternally grateful to my family, without them I am nothing. The crackling of the fire is the tune that I spin to, that releases me with my friends (the fumes that I told you about earlier). As I float purposely higher in the clear unending sky, I mingle with my comrades as we laugh and giggle at the fun we will have later. So much can be done from here that its hard to choose. I want to do it all.
I am the one who now sprinkles the soot, the fine icing that I’ve made, my own little garnish over the delicate trees and their precious green leaves. However will their stomata work when they are clogged? Oh it's such a pity. I am the rugged winds that carry the dirt particles, the precious diamonds, the assortment of whirling hazy gases, the boas of smoke from their commercialised points of origins, across vast oceans, over pointed mountain peeks to foreign lands. Sometimes Asia, Africa, China, India, Thailand;these are only some of my favourites.
I am a baker, mixing my ingredients with some water, kneading a soft fluffy cloud of acid ready to fall as precipitation. I am amused by the way the toxic substance burns the roots of the people’s plants, crops and fruitage, leaches their once rich brown soil, and wipes out the produce that they base their lives on. I smirk at the dirty children in torn rags that drink the water that I have infected, the twist of their features at its foul tasting flavour, the churning in their stomachs, the scald in their winding intestines, the diarrhoea that’s brewing. I laugh at the men who attempt to put food on their tables, who stand in the baking sun whipping them all through the day, knee deep in water, net at the ready. My homemade liquor has transformed crystal clear lakes where fish used to frolic into green, murky pools with a Clingfilm covering of algae. All in a day’s work.
By: Soracha O’Rourke
Find out how you can take action on climate change here.
Read part two here.
