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Long ago and far away, back when I was an eighth-grader at Horace Mann Elementary school in Bayonne, N.J., I was given an aptitude evaluation and tested high for “persuasion.” I don’t remember what methods they used to determine what our defining character traits were — traits that might indicate what lines of work we were best suited for. But I do remember that my own defining characteristic was this one, slightly poetic, word.

There is nothing like a good, old-fashioned global panic to get people moving on an important issue like climate change.

I’m living a life of quiet desperation at the moment, for nothing is hoving into view on the sportive horizon. I have, as Georgie and her peers say, reached out, though no one thus far has reached out to me. I guess I’ll go on reaching out. Surely something (or someone) will turn up. . . .