alias Bruce.

If you want to hear Governor Chris Christie ferociously blow the "populist" cover of the Republican Party over Hurricane Sandy,

watch Christie's Wednesday news conference in which he called his own party and its congressional leader, John Boehner, what they are: a den of amoral mercenaries more beholden to their own crooked loyalties than anything remotely resembling the public interest. This truth is no secret, to be sure. But to hear a solid corporate-political functionary so bluntly and bitterly call out his colleagues is pretty remarkable.

In my lifetime, I have seen few mainstream politicians speak with such candid fury. I sat transfixed in my parked car listening to the C-SPAN broadcast of Christie's news conference. In response to congressional leadership's refusal to act on relief for Sandy victims after more than 60 horrific days had elapsed, Christie was beyond infuriated. He was a man willing to bear enraged witness to the tangible human casualties of an inhuman political regime.

It's interesting what the raw reality of an overwhelming natural disaster will do to create political fractures in corporate monarchy.

Expect to see more of this as climate change intensifies.

Yeah, right, Mitt and Rick,

climate change is a left-wing myth.

So here's the problem with earthquakes and hurricanes and tornadoes and violent storms and forest fires

and the entire weird plethora of extreme environmental events we are painfully beginning to get used to:

We have a whole cast of players with colossal vested interests in a way of life that creates climate change: oil companies, coal companies, natural gas companies, timber companies, real estate developers, car and truck manufacturers and dealers, agribusiness, food processors and distributors, fast food conglomerates (who depend on agribusiness), highway builders, airlines, furniture manufacturers, factories of all kinds. And that's just a sampling.

But at the same time, we citizens have a growing shared certainty -- like the knowledge in the pit of the stomach of a married person who knows they are going to have to ask for a divorce -- that the increasingly wild earthly events through which we are living are not accidents, but a looming warning. A hammer over our heads. Most us feel it. With every new report of a "freak storm" or "monster fire" or "surprising string" of events, we feel it.

We know, more and more, that our way of life won't work. And we know that the planet is trying to shrug it off, and that if we don't change it, and change it fast, she will shrug us off with it.

But our moneychangers and their Capitol Hill employees don't want to hear what we know. We need pipelines, they tell us. We need more roads. We need timber, we need oil, we need mass-production grain-based agriculture, we need cheap patio furniture from South America and Asia. We need to do what we're doing. For just a while longer.

And meanwhile Hurricane Irene crashes into New York and an earthquake hits the East Coast and tornadoes spring up like killer weeds and scientists agree that we are in big trouble. And every morning when you and I walk out into the world we feel as if we are taking another step off a cliff.

Because we are.

While sitting on the interstate for five hours last night in a snowstorm,

I climbed into the cab of a friendly trucker so I wouldn't run out of gas keeping my car warm. He's from Israel. He lives in Florida with his wife, who is from Germany. He owns his rig and he hauls for one company, although he can switch to another any time he likes. He drives 10 hours a day, and is away from home four or five days a week. I asked him how he can handle driving that much. He shrugged and said he's gotten used to it and he likes seeing different places and meeting people. But he also said he's thinking about making a change while he's still young, because trucking is a hard life: bad food, not enough time at home or exercise or good sleep. We talked about travel, Obama and the Republican Congress and the economy, our lives, and trucks (his Freightliner gets 6 miles to the gallon and has a 300-gallon tank. A fill-up costs $700).

As it happened, he and I agreed on, or were intrigued by, nearly all we talked about. But hanging out with him got me to thinking, for the 100th time, of something I have long found to be true. Beneath the opinions and the politics, about which our big village of humans needs to struggle and argue if we care about living together, there is this: when we are willing to see and honor the indestructible goodness at the heart of most people we encounter (including ourselves), we are then freer to challenge what we see as the bad ideas and bad behavior of those people (including our ourselves). In one good swoop, we validate someone at the deepest level and thereby strengthen our authority to challenge things they say or do.

One of the traps of today's hate-mongering discourse, with its casual references to gunning down the opposition (e.g., "We come unarmed – This time"), is that it jumps to the assassin's assumption that people with "bad" ideas are "bad" people. It brings violence into the equation, whether through conceptual or physically literal annihilation of an opponent's personhood. In so doing, it guarantees that it will influence no one but existing converts, because none of us will listen to, or take seriously, anyone who sums up our personhood as "bad" because they detest our ideas.

But when we take the other tack and recognize the innate goodness of everyone's personhood (or most people's personhood, anyway), we gain more authority to criticize or even passionately condemn some of their opinions and actions precisely because we expect better of the innate goodness of their personhood. Their inner excuses about our not truly seeing them are then rendered false. So are our own excuses about not being truly seen -- when we or others subject us to the same blend of soulful validation and stern challenge. It creates at least the possibility of truly honest debate. If American discourse has a prayer of evolving toward democracy, this has to be a part of it. Of course, preventing corporations from essentially hiring our government and shaping our mass-media speech would also help.

It's kind of nice what you have time to reflect on when you're lucky enough to be caught in a snowstorm.

Russia bans grain exports

due to a record drought.

Record heat roasts the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

Severe weather has increased.

Does anybody out there besides the reality-challenged still believe climate change is not real?

Snowstorm.

There is two feet of new snow in my yard right now. This might not sound like much to northerners (like me, originally from Rochester, NY), but for Baltimore this is a millennial blizzard. There were thirty inches in some areas here since yesterday, I heard. It took me an hour to shovel a narrow path from my door to the driveway. The roads are deserted. Even if you can shovel out your car, where are you going to drive? Walking – like having a manual typewriter in the deep woods – reassumes its superiority.

One of the great things about snowstorms, for me, is that they free us of routines from which we lack the will (or sometimes the option) to free ourselves: errands, stores, reporting to jobs, reporting to school, deciding when to be at home and when not to be. All of a sudden, there is no place to go other than places you can reach on your own two feet while swathed in 10 pounds of clothing. Must-do's become expendable. There is no gotta-be-there thing that simply can't wait (unless you're talking hospital emergency rooms). You've got the gift of enforced open time and space, no thanks to yourself, but courtesy of an act of the Universe. Pretty cool.

Today I balanced my checkbook (for me, a revelatory experience), watched three cardinals cast their almost blinding red against the overwhelming white, shoveled, scribbled some notes for a poem I think I'm going to like, ate temple oranges (how come you can only get them for about a month?), burned a bunch of CDs, meditated, and made a snow angel. Man, it felt good to fall backward into the deep snow and lie there, letting it conform to me like some powder-ice-pack Swedish mattress. To a guy with a sore back after an hour of shoveling, the soft cold supporting my lumbar arch felt like heaven. I must have lain there for five minutes grinning and making animal noises.

We need this. Things that step in and say, "stop."