Do you remember the movie “John Tucker Must Die?” If you don’t, I’ll give you a quick synopsis — and if you do, read it anyways; I could be doing work for my class right now instead of this. Basically, John Tucker is this a**hole jock at a high school, and he leads on a bunch of girls who really like him, and the girls find out and decide he “must die.” It’s been years since I’ve seen the movie, but I’m pretty sure that’s it.

Anyways, I’m here to tell you that that movie is a metaphor for not only my life but all of our lives. I know that may come as a shock. You may be asking yourself right now: how is that so? Who is the metaphorical John Tucker? Who am I? How did I get to this link — I didn’t mean to click on it?

Well, my friends, I’ll tell you. We are the girls. And we are getting played by the real-life John Tucker: global warming.

We’ve had a nice first and second week of classes back here at Syracuse. It’s been between 30 and 40 degrees, not too snowy — until recently, but I’ll get to that — and not super windy. Whenever we have these sort of days, I hear at least one person exclaim to his friends as he waltzes down the promenade in his jean jacket, “Wow, it’s so warm, I love global warming.” Basically, everyone on campus is in a good mood — it’s like these 40-degree days come, and we all get so happy and forget about all of the mean things that global warming has done to us. Like remember when he tried killing all the bees? Or when he threw a bomb cyclone at us? That storm cancelled so many flights and screwed up so many travel plans — didn’t that make you mad?

The answer is yes, it did: but global warming knew that. He saw us as we were complaining on our phones, stuck in the Philadelphia airport, just wanting to return home and get into bed. He knew, and he let it happen anyways. He watched us as we trudged to class through three feet of snow. And finally, he watched us as we moved slowly through the snow towards the recycling bin, finally wanting to make a change in the world, and bam — he hits us with the unnatural 40-degree day in the middle of January. We love these days, even though they’re bad for us, and we go crawling right back to global warming, forgiving him for all the times he has wronged us and thanking him for such a beautiful day. Aren’t we pathetic?

I’m here to finally say enough of this madness. We deserve better. Global warming has been playing us like a fiddle, and we’re not fiddles, we are human beings, with human hearts and emotions. He has caused us all so much suffering, and we can’t forget that.

What I want everyone to do now is to remember that time they were stuck in the airport because of the bomb cyclone, remember that time a series of hurricanes hit the world earlier this year, remember that bee you loved that global warming took away from you and remember that anger.

Now harvest that anger, shut off your computer, sprint to your trash can and go start separating your plastics and papers from your regular trash. It’ll make him so mad.

Annabeth Grace Mann is a sophomore film major. Her column appears biweekly. She can be reached at agmann@syr.edu.

Published on January 26, 2018 at 5:08 pm