Climate change and sitting on tacks

A friend recently told me that her building in lower Manhattan flooded when Hurricane Sandy hit. We tsk-tsked about Climate Change, but when I asked her if she’d move, she shrugged. Apparently not.

So many of us shrug. We worry. We write letters. We march. But our daily lives pretty much remain the same. This reminded me of a story we quoted in Your Money or Your Life about a man, a doctor and a pain in the butt. Here’s an excerpt – and do ask, “What tacks am I sitting on?”:

“Suppose that I, a family doctor, make a house call to see a patient with a pain in the gluteus maximus — the buttock. In the course of my physical examination I find that the patient is sitting on a tack.