“I was talking to a friend who was feeling down about human-caused global climate change. “It may be,” I told a friend in London as we walked across Tower Bridge, “that our ticket was punched before we ever got started.” While there is no doubt we’re cutting our time on earth shorter through carbon emissions and the destruction of the ecology, it might be that our species was never going to make it past the end of the womb of our ice-age birth. I explained this, about how fragile an organism we are, and how the ice ages cycle. She laughed, she was used to my strange form of hope. “You have to choose to have hope, or just jump out of a window,” a person I was interviewing once told me, a person who’d been accused of techno-utopianism. We were walking along the California coast hills at sunset, talking about all the ways our technological lives could go wrong, and the many ways it is going wrong. He wasn’t utopian, it turned out, he’d thought of the worst long before his detractors had. He’d decided to try to head it off, instead of jumping out of a window. We are diseased and angry and we kill each other and ourselves and all the world. We are killing off life on Earth like a slow moving asteroid. I try to look at this, and my own part in it. Sometimes it is overwhelming. I feel so powerless trying to comprehend all the terrible things we face, much less get past them into our future, with our humanity and our inconceivably beautiful little blue-green planet preserved. … All these grown-up monsters for my grown-up mind, they are there in the nights I wake up terrified and taunted by death. When I feel so small and broken, when despair and terror take me, I have a secret tool, a talisman against the night. I don’t use it too often so that it doesn’t lose its power. I learned it on airplanes, which are strange and thrilling and full of fear and boredom and discomfort. When I am very frightened, I look out the window on airplanes and say very quietly: I have seen the tops of clouds And I have. In all the history of humanity, I am one of the few that has seen the tops of clouds. Many would have died to do so, and some did. I have seen them many times. I have seen the Earth from space, and spun it around like a god to see what’s on the other side. We are the only consciousness we’ve ever found that has looked deep into the infinite dark, and instead of dark, we saw galaxies. Galaxies! Suns and worlds beyond number. We have looked into our world and found atoms, atomic forces, systems that dance to the glorious music of the universe. We have seen actual wonders that verge on the ineffable. We have coined a word for the ineffable. We have coined thousands of words for the ineffable. In our pain we find a kind of magic, in our worst and meanest specimens we find the flesh of a common human story. We are red with it. I know mysteries that great philosophers would have died for, just to have them whispered in their dying ears. I can look them up on my smartphone. I live in the middle of miracles, conceptions and magics easily worth many lifetimes to learn, from which I can pick and choose. I have wisdom and knowledge poured around me like a river, more than I could learn in a thousand lifetimes, and I am still alive. It is good that I am alive, it is good that we are alive. Even if we kill ourselves off with nuclear fire, or gray goo, or drown ourselves in stinking acid oceans, it is good that we have lived, that we did all of this, and that we grew into what we are, and learned to dream of what we could be. The only thing we can say for sure is that we will die, but we will die having gone so far above our primordial ponds and primate forests that we saw the tops of clouds.”
Thor, post-Ragnarok, doesnt really know what to do with himself. he’s lost. so he pushes some buttons and manages to space-skype-call steve rogers. thor relates to steve what went down, and basically goes. im king even though i didnt really wanna be, not really sure what to do please help.
and steve goes hey have you ever heard of democracy
so thor, having found a way to maybe not have to be king of asgard or at least be king with a lot more explicit support, delightedly calls a shipwide meeting. he explains the concept of voting (maybe not like. super clearly) and issues ballots. the vote goes like this:
Everybody who’s not really sure what’s going on with this voting thing just votes for thor. that seems like a safe call. some of the really confused ones just write in their own names. a fair number of other asgardians, who actually understand what’s happening, vote thor on purpose, but a lot of it is confusion.
Loki votes for himself. he doesn’t really want to be in charge of this mess but honestly he can’t help himself. Several of the escaped gladiators also vote loki, mostly because they didn’t really follow the whole loki-thor dynamic and loki summoned a giant flaming magma man to kill a planet, which was pretty cool. that guy seems to have a handle on stuff.
the Valkyrie votes “Thor, lord of sparkles.”
Every child votes hulk. they were all issued ballots because nobody realized they maybe shouldn’t be. dr banner votes Hiemdall.
literally every person who has a good grasp on the situation votes heimdall. thor votes hiemdall.
hiemdall loses to thor by one vote. it was heimdall’s. he voted for thor.
yeah heimdall ABSOLUTELY knows exactly what he’s doing when he votes for thor. he sees everything, he knows how the vote will go. he has watched literally every single member of the line of odin go off the rails while trying to run asgard, and he wants no part of that mess.
he’s heimdall. he doesn’t have to be in charge to do whatever the fuck he wants.
Y’all lucky i can’t draw for shit cause that pose and the way bucky’s hair does that beautiful wavey thing as it falls to his side fucking HAUNTS ME, and if i could you can bet your asses I’d be bombarding your dashes with a million pics of it
who wants to bet Thor cries a bit when he meets Bucky and sees his long and luscious and thoroughly conditioned with Wakandan Coconut Oil hair
what i do is not up to you 