Kyrsten Sinema and the End of Human Kind

 There is a movie trope wherein some nerdy kid finds him or herself on a sports team.  They don't really want to be there, but there they are:  a reluctant player in a crucial game where the championship is to be decided.  And there they are at the endgame, where, if the kid catches the ball, their team wins the championship, and if they miss the ball, their team loses.  Of course, the kid misses the ball, and everyone blames the kid.

This is, on the part of the team (everyone) typical scapegoating behavior.  The reality is that the team just wasn't good enough to win decisively, and therefore, their loss was the result of being unable to score enough points to win by more than one missed ball.

And one could possibly argue that the loss wasn't simply on the team itself.  Maybe the parents of those kids on the losing team didn't provide their children with enough resources to rise to a more competent level; and maybe those parents didn't earn enough or were educated enough to provide those resources to their children; and maybe those parents couldn't earn enough because they lived in the wrong county, because the main business of the county left for Mexico, and so on.

Which brings us to Kyrsten Sinema, whose intransigence in opposing a major climate bill might mean that the bill never passes, which might mean that US citizens will continue to pollute at five times the rate of any other person in the world, thus speeding the rate of climate change to a catastrophic tipping point before the world can change its behavior, and thus creates a climate that will cause the deaths of billions.  And for that, we can reasonably blame Krysten Sinema.

On the other hand, if the fate of humanity is going to depend on the action of one person, if the world hasn't done enough to save itself in spite of Krysten Sinema's intransigence, then climate catastrophe is just as much the world's fault as it is the fault of a metaphorical asshole.