How many times will we rebuild Florida's cities, Houston, coastal New Jersey, New Orleans and other population centers ravaged by storms lethally intensified by global warming? At what point, surveying the devastation and knowing more is inevitable, will we walk away, leaving behind vast coastal dead zones? Will we retreat even further into magical thinking to cope with the fury we have unleashed from the natural world? Or will we respond rationally and radically alter our relationship to this earth that gives us life?

Civilizations over the past 6,000 years have unfailingly squandered their futures through acts of colossal stupidity and hubris. We are probably not an exception. The physical ruins of these empires, including the Mesopotamian, Roman, Mayan and Indus, litter the earth. They elevated, during acute distress, inept and corrupt leaders who channeled anger, fear and dwindling resources into self-defeating wars and vast building projects. The ruling oligarchs, driven by greed and hedonism, retreated into privileged compounds-the Forbidden City, Versailles-and hoarded wealth as their populations endured mounting misery and poverty. The worse it got, the more the people lied to themselves and the more they wanted to be lied to. Reality was too painful to confront. They retreated into what anthropologists call "crisis cults," which promised the return of the lost world through magical beliefs.

"The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present," philosopher and psychologist William James wrote, "and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose."

We are entering this final phase of civilization, one in which we are slashing the budgets of the very agencies that are vital to prepare for the devastation ahead-the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, along with programs at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration dealing with climate change. Hurricane after hurricane, monster storm after monster storm, flood after flood, wildfire after wildfire, drought after drought will gradually cripple the empire, draining its wealth and resources and creating swathes of territory defined by lawlessness and squalor.

These dead zones will obliterate not only commercial and residential life but also military assets. As Jeff Goodell points out in "The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilized World," "The Pentagon manages a global real estate portfolio that includes over 555,000 facilities and 28 million acres of land-virtually all of it will be impacted by climate change in some way."

As this column is being written, three key military facilities in Florida are evacuated: the Miami-area headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military operations in the Caribbean and Latin America; the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, in charge of overseas operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia; and the Naval Air Station in Key West. There will soon come a day when obliteration of infrastructure will prohibit military operations from returning. Add to the list of endangered military installations Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, the U.S. missile base in the Marshall Islands, the U.S. naval base on Diego Garcia and numerous other military sites in coastal areas and it becomes painfully clear that the existential peril facing the empire is not in the Middle East but in the seas and the skies. There are 128 U.S. military installations at risk from rising sea levels, including Navy, Air Force, Marine and Army facilities in Virginia. Giant vertical rulers dot the highway outside the Norfolk naval base to allow motorists to determine if the water is too deep to drive through. In two decades, maybe less, the main road to the base will be impassable at high tide daily.

Cities across the globe, including London, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Lagos, Copenhagen, New Orleans, San Francisco, Savannah, Ga., and New York, will become modern-day versions of Atlantis, along with countries such as Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands and large parts of New Zealand and Australia. There are 90 coastal cities in the U.S. that endure chronic flooding, a number that is expected to double in the next two decades. National economies will go into tailspins as wider and wider parts of the globe suffer catastrophic systems breakdown. Central authority and basic services will increasingly be nonexistent. Hundreds of millions of people, desperate for food, water and security, will become climate refugees. Nuclear power plants, including Turkey Point, which is on the edge of Biscayne Bay south of Miami, will face meltdowns, such as the accident that occurred in the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan after it was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami. These plants will spew radioactive waste into the sea and air. Exacerbated by disintegration of the polar ice caps, the catastrophes will be too overwhelming to manage. We will enter what James Howard Kunstler calls "the long emergency." When that happens, our experiment in civilization might approach an end.

"The amount of real estate at risk in New York is mind-boggling: 72,000 buildings worth over $129 billion stand in flood zones today, with thousands more buildings at risk with each foot of sea-level rise," writes Jeff Goodell. "In addition, New York has a lot of industrial waterfront, where toxic materials and poor communities live in close proximity, as well as a huge amount of underground infrastructure-subways, tunnels, electrical systems. Finally, New York is a sea-level-rise hot spot. Because of changes in ocean dynamics, as well as the fact that the ground beneath the city is sinking as the continent recovers from the last ice age, seas are now rising about 50 percent faster in the New York area than the global average."

A society in crisis flees to the reassuring embrace of con artists and charlatans. Critics who ring alarm bells are condemned as pessimists who offer no "hope," the drug that keeps a doomed population passive. The current administration-which removed Barack Obama's Climate Action Plan from the White House website as soon as Donald Trump took office-and the Republican Party are filled with happy climate deniers. They have adopted a response to climate change similar to that of the Virginia Legislature: ban discussion of climate change and replace the term with the less ominous "recurrent flooding." This denial of reality-one also employed by those who assure us we can adapt-is driven by fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries that along with the rich and corporations fund the political campaigns of elected officials. They fear that a rational, effective response to climate change will impede profits. Our corporate media, dependent on advertising dollars, contributes to the conspiracy of silence. It ignores the patterns and effects of climate change, focusing instead on feel-good stories about heroic rescues or dramatic coverage of flooded city centers and storm refugee caravans fleeing up the coast of Florida.

Droughts, floods, famines and disease will eventually see the collapse of social cohesion in large parts of the globe, including U.S. coastal areas. The insecurity, hunger and desperation among the dispossessed of the earth will give rise to ad hoc militias, crime and increased acts of terrorism. The Pentagon report "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States Security" is blunt. "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life," it grimly concludes.

But as Goodell points out, "In today's political climate, open discussion of the security risks of climate change is viewed as practically treasonous." When in 2014 then-Secretary of State John Kerry called climate change "perhaps the world's most fearsome weapon of mass destruction" and compared it to the effects of terrorism, epidemics and poverty, the right-wing trolls, from John McCain to Newt Gingrich, went into a frenzy. Gingrich called for Kerry's resignation because "a delusional secretary of state is dangerous to our safety."

James Woolsey, the former head of the CIA, wrote in a climate change report for the Pentagon titled "The Age of Consequences: The Foreign-Policy National Security Implications of Global Climate Change":

If Americans have difficulty reaching a reasonable compromise on immigration legislation today, consider what such a debate would be like if we were struggling to resettle millions of our own citizens-driven by high water from the Gulf of Mexico, South Florida, and much of the East Coast reaching nearly to New England-even as we witnessed the northward migration of large populations from Latin America and the Caribbean. Such migration will likely be one of the Western Hemisphere's early social consequences of climate change and sea level rise of these orders of magnitude. Issues deriving from inundation of a large amount of our own territory, together with migration towards our borders by millions of our hungry and thirsty southern neighbors, are likely to dominate U.S. security and humanitarian concerns. Globally as well, populations will migrate from increasingly hot and dry climates to more temperate ones.

As Goodell writes, "People will notice higher tides that roll in more and more frequently. Water will pool longer in streets and parking lots. Trees will turn brown and die as they suck up salt water." We will retreat to higher ground, cover our roofs with solar panels, finally stop using plastic and go vegan, but it will be too late. As Goodell writes, "even in rich neighborhoods, abandoned houses will linger like ghosts, filling with feral cats and other refugees looking for their own higher ground."

The water will continue to rise. "It will have a metallic sheen and will smell bad," Goodell writes. "Kids will get strange rashes and fevers. More people will leave [low areas]. Seawalls will crumble. In a few decades, low-lying neighborhoods will be knee-deep. Wooden houses will collapse into a sea of soda bottles, laundry detergent jugs, and plastic toothbrushes. Human bones, floated out of caskets, will be a common sight. Treasure hunters will kayak in, using small robotic submersibles to search for coins and jewelry. Modern office buildings and condo towers will lean as salt water corrodes the concrete foundations and eats away at the structural beams. Fish will school in the classrooms. Oysters will grow on submerged light poles. Religious leaders will blame sinners for the drowning of the city."

The damage suffered by Houston, Tampa and Miami is not an anomaly. It is the beginning of the end. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.
(c) 2017 Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, spent seven years in the Middle East. He was part of the paper's team of reporters who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. Keep up with Chris Hedges' latest columns, interviews, tour dates and more at www.truthdig.com/chris-hedges.

TODAY IS the last day of the 93rd year of my life. Ridiculous.

Am I moderately satisfied with my life until now? Yes. I am.

If by a miracle I could be returned to, say, 14, and travel all this long way again, would I like that? No, I would not.

Enough is enough.

IN THESE 93 years, the world has changed completely.

A few days after my birth in Germany, a ridiculous little demagogue called Adolf Hitler attempted a putsch in Munich. He was put in prison, where he wrote a tedious book called Mein Kampf. Nobody took any notice.

The World War (no one called it World War I yet) was still a recent memory. Almost every family had lost at least one member. I was told that a remote uncle of mine had frozen to death on the Austrian-Italian front.

On the day of my birth, inflation was raging in Germany. My birth cost many millions of marks. Many people lost all they had. My father, a young banker, got rich. He understood how money works. I did not inherit this talent, nor did I wish to.

We had a telephone at home, a rarity. My father loved new gadgets. When I was three or four years old, we got a new invention, a radio. No one even dreamed of television, not to mention the internet.

We were not religious. We lit Hanukkah candles, fasted on Yom Kippur and ate Matzot on Passover. Giving this up looked like cowardice in the face of the antisemites. But it had no real meaning for us.

MY FATHER was a Zionist. When he married my mother, a pretty young secretary, one of the wedding presents was a printed document stating that a tree had been planted in the name of the couple in Palestine.

At the time, the Zionists were a tiny minority among the Jews in Germany (and elsewhere). Most Jews thought that they were a bit crazy. A current joke had it that a Zionist was a Jew who gave money to a second Jew in order to send a third Jew to Palestine.

Why did my father become a Zionist? He certainly did not dream of going to Palestine himself. His family had been living in Germany for many generations. Since he had learned Latin and Ancient Greek at school, he imagined that our family had arrived in Germany with Julius Caesar. That's why our roots were in a small town (I have forgotten its name) on the banks of the Rhine.

So what about his Zionism? My father was a "Querkopf", a contrarian. He did not like to run with the herd. It suited him to belong to a lonely little group. The Zionists.

This quirk of my father's personality probably saved my life. When the Nazis came to power - I was just nine years old - my father decided immediately to leave for Palestine. My mother told me much later that the trigger was a young German who told my father in court: "Herr Ostermann, we don't need Jews like you anymore!"

My father was deeply insulted. At the time he was a highly respected court-appointed receiver, a person in charge of bankruptcies, famous for his honesty. For years a terrible economic crisis had ravaged Germany, and bankruptcies were plentiful. This helped the demagogue called Hitler, the same one, on his way to power, shouting "Down with the Jews."

I was an eye-witness to the Nazi victory. Brown shirts could be seen everywhere in the streets. They were not alone: every major party had a private army, wearing uniforms. There were the Red Front of the communists, the Black-Red-Gold Flag of the Social-Democrats, the Steel Helmet of the Conservatives, and more. When the time came, not one of them lifted a finger.

I never attended kindergarten and was sent to school when I was five and a half years old. At the age of nine and a half I was sent to the Gymnasium, where I started to learn Latin. I was in a Zionist youth movement. Half a year later I heaved a profound sigh of relief when the train carried us across the Rhine to France - some 2000 years after my forefathers had crossed the Rhine in the opposite direction, according to family legend.

For many years I suppressed the memory of these first years of my life. My life started when I stood on the deck of a ship and saw in the early daylight a thin brown strip appear in the east. I was ten years and two months old. It was the beginning of my new life.

OH, THE bliss! A large boat with a huge, dark boatman brought me from the ship to the shore of Jaffa. What a mysterious, magical place! Full of people who spoke a strange, guttural language, who gesticulated wildly! All around the wonderful smell of a market with exotic foods! Horse-drawn carriages in the streets.

I mention these first impressions because later I read the biography of David Ben-Gurion, who had arrived at the same place some years before me. What an awful place! What a guttural language! What barbaric gesticulation! What disgusting smells!

I LOVED this country on first sight, and I still love it, although it has changed beyond recognition. I cannot imagine living anywhere else.

People keep asking me if I am a "Zionist". I answer that I don't know what "Zionism" means these days. To my mind, Zionism died a natural death when the State of Israel was born. Now we have an Israeli nation, closely connected with the Jewish people everywhere - but a new nation nevertheless, with its own geopolitical surroundings, with its own problems. We are bound to world Jewry rather like, say, Australia or Canada are to Britain.

This is so clear to me, that I can hardly understand the endless debates about Zionism. To me, these debates are empty of real, honest content.

So are the endless debates about "the Arabs", debates neither real nor honest. The Arabs were here when we arrived. I have just described what I felt towards them. I still believe that the early Zionists made a terrible mistake when they did not try to combine their aspirations with the hopes of the Palestinian population. Realpolitik told them to embrace their Turkish oppressors instead. Sad.

The best description of the conflict was given by the historian Isaac Deutscher: a man lives in an upper floor of a house that catches fire. In desperation the man jumps out of the window and lands on a passer-by down below, who is grievously injured and becomes an invalid. Between the two, there erupts a deadly conflict. Who is right?

Not an exact parallel, but close enough to inspire thought.

Religion has nothing to do with it. Judaism and Islam are close relatives, much closer to each other than either of them is to Christianity. The catchphrase "Judeo-Christian" is bogus, an invention of ignoramuses. If our conflict turns into a religious one, that would be a tragic aberration.

I am a complete atheist. In principle I respect the religion of others, but, frankly, I cannot even start to understand their convictions. They look to me like anachronistic relics of a primitive age. Sorry.

I AM an optimist by nature, even if my analytical mind tells me otherwise. I have seen in my life so many totally unexpected things, both good and bad, that I don't believe that any thing "must" happen.

But looking at the daily news, I could waver. So many stupid wars all over the place, so much awful suffering inflicted on so many innocent people. Some in the name of God, some in the name of race, some in the name of democracy. So stupid! So needless! In the year 2017!

The future of my own country fills me with anxiety. The conflict seems endless, without a solution. Yet to me, the solution is completely obvious, indeed so obvious that it is hard for me to understand how anyone in their right mind can avoid seeing it.

We have here two nations - Israelis and Palestinians. Innumerable historical examples show us that they cannot live together in one state. So they must live together in two states - "together" because both nations need close cooperation, with open borders and some joint political superstructures. Perhaps some kind of a voluntary confederation. And later on, perhaps some kind of union of the entire region.

All this in a world that is compelled by modern realities to unite more and more, moving towards some kind of world government.

I won't live long enough to see all this - but I am already seeing it in my mind's eyes on the eve of my 94th (a nice number, all in all.)

New York state prison guards assaulted and seriously injured 69 year-old former Black Panther Herman Bell, this week, a totally unprovoked beating timed to sabotage his chances for parole after more than 40 years behind bars. In neighboring New Jersey, former Panther Sundiata Acoli was denied parole last December shortly before his 80th birthday. Acoli has been behind bars since 1973, and eligible for parole since 1992. His next parole hearing won't come up for another 15 years -- when Acoli is 95 years old. Dozens of elderly Black activists remain entombed in a gulag that has expanded seven-fold since the federal government crushed the Black liberation movement and established a national Black Mass Incarceration State. Although slightly less than half the 2.3 million gulag inmates are African Americans, the system's founding rationale and central mission is race-based: to contain, control, and facilitate the removal of Black people from U.S. society. Although the U.S. is home to five times more whites than Blacks, African Americans outnumber whites in U.S. prisons and jails.

Black mass incarceration has been quite popular, historically -- a proven vote-getter among whites in all regions of the country. However, what goes around, comes around. In building the world's largest prison system to house the mostly non-white prey of the planet's most intrusive police state, the U.S. has condemned to the dungeons millions of non-targeted whites -- unintended, collateral damage of the race wars that birthed the nation and built an empire.

As BAR contributor Danny Haiphong writes in this week's issue, "Prisons in the U.S. are monuments that enforce terror against oppressed people." Indeed, these monuments to present-day oppression are far more numerous than the Confederate symbols that are the focus of current conflict. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified 1,503 physical symbols of the Confederacy, including 718 monuments and statues and 109 public schools, 80 counties and 10 military bases named for Confederate icons. Yet, Johnny Reb's footprint on the landscape is tiny compared to the 5,000 state and federal prisons and jails, plus about 1,000 juvenile and tribal detention facilities that crater the nation - a vast infrastructure of race and class rule.

The so-called "alt-right" has been hard-pressed to gather more than a few hundred Nazis, Klansmen and right-wing militia to make a stand around Confederate landmarks. But, this rag-tag "fascist threat" is dwarfed by the 431,600 prison guards that staff America's penal monuments to the dictatorship of rich white men.

It is commendable and necessary to go blow-for-blow in the streets against predatory racist gangs. It is also clear that Donald Trump is giving political aid and comfort to today's sons and daughters of the old Confederacy who, although not yet able to mass in large numbers, could do so in the future. But that threat pales in comparison to the three-quarters of million sworn police officers that strut the streets of America, killing Black and brown people with impunity and dragg hundreds of thousands into the gulag every year. According to Police magazine, 84 percent of cops supported Donald Trump for president. The statistic is no surprise, but points up the real threat to Black lives and the rule of law: the state, itself.

There has never been one moment, not one, when I believed Donald J. Trump would develop even marginal leadership skills once he became president. I never expected the much-ballyhooed "pivot" that would come just as soon as he realized how serious his job is and that we all might die if he screws up. The thought frankly never occurred to me. Waiting for a 71-year-old plutocrat to "mature" is not a high-yield use of my day. This is the guy who shouted, "Have a good time, everybody!" at a building filled with Harvey refugees.

Which is what made Wednesday so thoroughly fascinating. The man with the political instincts of a lobbed brick somehow closed out the day with a multi-dimensional checkmate maneuver that took down a number of large birds with one throw. The fact that Trump's motives were entirely self-involved only adds frosting to the cake.

Republican leadership in Congress wanted to tie Harvey relief to a bill that would lift the debt ceiling for 18 months, effectively removing it as an issue in the 2018 midterms. The Democrats agreed, but wanted 3 months instead of 18. The GOP said no, Speaker Ryan rose up in high public dudgeon over the very idea of "playing politics" with the debt ceiling ... and then Trump came down the mountain and abruptly made the deal with the Democrats, upending even his own Treasury Secretary in the process.

The Republican Party's motto should be "Wait, what?" from here on out. Trump's Democratic deal for three months of debt ceiling relief hit congressional Republicans like a bucket of bat urine. There was an almost feral recoiling within the ranks. With that deal, Trump ensured the Democrats could still campaign on the debt ceiling in 2018, and left them in a stronger negotiating position for future legislation.

More importantly, Trump removed the debt ceiling hostage from the room, infuriating the hard-right Freedom Caucus and the Republican Study Group, whose members wanted in the aftermath of their ACA repeal failure to use the ceiling as leverage to attack Medicaid again. Finally, just for flavor, he made Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell look like a couple of windbag backbenchers who have no idea what's really going on because they never get invited to the real meetings.

Congressional conservatives are now so thoroughly livid at Trump that they want to fire their own speaker, because someone has to pay the piper after this one. It isn't just that Pelosi and Schumer thoroughly rolled the president of the United States in his own house. Trump turned out his pockets and put his hands over his head. As CNN political analyst Paul Begala noted, "Poor president Donald Trump was lucky he got out of the room with his hair."

Lifting the debt ceiling was the right thing to do. Making a deal to get Harvey aid done was the right thing to do. Donald J. Trump couldn't possibly care less about what is or is not the right thing to do. He did this for a few reasons, each of them more selfish than the last.

Trump is comprehensively pissed at McConnell and Ryan, and not just because nothing beyond a Supreme Court appointment has gotten done. He thinks those guys should be protecting him from the Russia probe, defending him vehemently in the press, and they haven't. In Trump's world, if you're not taking a bullet for the boss, you're with the snipers throwing shots. Whatever else this was, in Trump's mind it was payback.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo did a fine job of explaining how this move speaks to the core essence of Trump himself. "Trump needs to dominate people," writes Marshall. "Clearly Trump felt that McConnell and Ryan are not serving him well enough or loyally enough or both. So he lashed out or tried to damage them. Schumer and Pelosi were simply the most convenient cudgels available."

This deal, and the resulting political convulsion that followed it, has also temporarily removed Trump's devastating DACA decision from the national media conversation. Apparently, the president was surprised and hurt when his decision to blow up the lives of nearly a million people wasn't met with universal approval. With this, he changed the subject and saved himself a few hours of grief.

There was nothing Machiavellian in this particular move -- and certainly nothing noble or patriotic or even vaguely generous. Trump needed to put a hurt on someone in service to himself, and he chose his own party to be the victim.