Viewing newly accepted levels of violence in the U.S. is overwhelming and frightening. A few people have posted lists of things we can do to help, but I wonder if, for many people, it's asking too much. This might be a controversial view at a time when it feels like we all need to get on board to shift the world back to a less selfish and violent place, but the perspective that we all are complicit if we don't act might do more harm than good.
I write more about Covid than climate because we can actually dramatically decrease the problem with rampant viral transmission in the next few years with tools on hand if we make a global concerted effort. The climate is much, much more complex and multifaceted and just maybe beyond our most intense efforts.
But check out Roger Hallam's letter sent over a phone from prison. He just started a five-year sentence.
"This is not about five nice white middle-class people being banged up for 'protest' on 'the climate.' It's about a few million not-so-nice white people deciding to have a few hundred million brown people die. Just for starters. This is not about 'climate change'; we agree with the judge on that. It is about murder. At scale. Forever. And that is a bad things, a very bad thing, and evil thing. When the United Nations recently said we have two years to save the world, that they are not being 'melodramatic,' that economies will be 'devastated,' they mean it. Not in some distant future. In the next 10 to 20 years, that's what 1,000 public statement have said. It's what 10,000 peer-reviewed papers have said. It's coming. It is what it is. At some point, you'll be stepping over body parts on the way to work, going 'well, you know.'"
We're going to see a dramatic upswing in climate refugees, and at some point we'll all close our borders as we gather around the last bits of agricultural land that's still viable and not been paved over. As the watering hole gets smaller, the animals look at one another differently.
Hallam takes on both sides of the political spectrum:
"Conservatives are the bad guys and liberals are the bad guys who pretend to be good guys, and the latter are the worse, which is why historically they are held in more contempt. They knew, but they did nothing. As Martin Luther King said in a letter from a Birmingham jail, it's the moderates that repress, distract, sabotage the resistance to injustice."
I think they all know. I can't believe that all those conservatives see the floods and fires and still don't think something is happening to our climate and connect the dots. I could be wrong, but I believe they're more corrupt than naive. Ford, for instance, is stripping the province for parts, and lining his pockets so he and his family will be well protected for the coming collapse. The liberals are open about knowing, and then don't do anything substantial to change things, for sure. Even the NDP advocate for more pipelines. They said we're not ready for the big transition, but that transition's coming, ready or not.
The fact that people largely don't say that climate change isn't happening, or even that it's not human caused, because both of those have been largely debunked, shows that it's not ignorance but greed that fuels them. The new denialism from those with ties to fossil fuels now say that climate solutions don't work, climate science is unreliable, and climate impacts aren't that bad. We're all just alarmists!
Hallam writes,
"This trial was not about 'the right to protest.' It is not about 'a cause,' 'an issue.' It's civil resistance against the biggest death project in human history, the greatest ever act of criminality. This trial was an experiment with the truth. . . . We continue to speak even when the judges shouted at us to stop, had us dragged from the dock, banged up in jail. This is what evil looks like. It's what it does. And it's just the beginning. Integrity at the present time is resistance. . . . Integrity is a hard path. Your ego has to burn in a fire that destroys its desire to control. Integrity is humiliation, failure, being forgotten. As the greatest soul of the 20th century, Simone Vale [sic - Simone Weil], said: When you have an important decision to make, choose the most costly option."
Simone Weil is one of the greatest souls to have ever lived!
This is all about caring more about larger things than yourself, and that's not something most of us were taught in our current society. Instead, we've learned to laugh at that lesson, to scoff at people who want to protect others, who bike instead of driving and don't fly on vacation and avoid eating meat or buying anything they don't need. We've been trained to see them as weirdos because environmentalists are very bad for profits.
But so is climate change, as we'll soon find out.
In case you've missed it, many students on university campuses have been protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The police have been heavy-handed -- or outright violent -- with some of the students. Yet one prof wrote about his primary concerns in the NY Times: that the constant noise disrupts his class and the protests are upsetting for Jewish students.
Listen to Nathan explain the problem with a capitalist structure that forces the elderly to continue working.
@nathanreo #revolution #deconstruction #deconstructingcapitalism #capitalism #socialism #decentralization #socialprogress #awakening #humanevolution #shiftinconsciousness #consciousness #spirituality ♬ original sound - Reo
"Capitalism is a gross system of slavery and human rights abuse. . . . It's economic authoritarianism. If you're on a fixed income and now can't afford to live, economic forces have effectively forced the elderly to go back to work. . . .These people shouldn't be driving or part of the labour force. . . . We act like capitalism is a truth of nature, but no. We've only had this kind of capitalism for the last couple hundred years. We should be waking up to that this is real economic slavery. It removes from people the product of their own labour as it's centralized in the hands in a few billionaires. Our system is psychotic, and both political parties are not interested in deconstructing the whole thing. We need a new civil rights movement. MLK recognized he couldn't push this through a couple progressive politicians. . . . The real part of the movement happened outside of politics."
Conflict, climate, and covid are showing us the worst of ourselves, but it might be what we need to find our collective humanity.
Tiberius wrote:
"The old world is no longer dying, it is dead. There is no going back to how things were after this genocide has been live-streamed in high definition and Technicolour for the world to see and our leaders to endorse. The bloodthirsty status quo has been revealed to too many people, and some cats will simply not go back into their bags.
I know what the inside of skulls look like now. I know how bodies burn and how limbs come off. I know that children never look more devastatingly innocent than when they’ve been killed by a vicious army using the world’s most advanced weaponry. I know this because I’ve seen so many of them now—so many more than the sum of all the living children I will likely ever know. I know how much pain a person can bear and still exist in this world—just ask any Palestinian still alive. There are so many images I will never forget that everything outside of Gaza seems as meaningless as what colour socks I wear.
Margaret Heffernan explains the term and the CDC provides a great example of it!
Heffernan lectures to MBA classes and runs a few businesses and such, so she's not someone I'd typically follow, but this is a great talk, and only 14 minutes, but the gist of it is in the slightly abridged transcript below:
In Libby, Montana, there's a rather unusual woman named Gayla Benefield [pictured above]. She always felt a little bit of an outsider, although she's been there almost all her life —a woman of Russian extraction. She told me that when she went to school, she was the only girl who ever chose to do mechanical drawing. Later in life, she got a job going house to house reading utility meters, gas meters, electricity meters. And she was doing the work in the middle of the day. And one thing particularly caught her notice, which was, in the middle of the day, she met a lot of men who were at home — middle-aged, late middle-aged — and a lot of them seemed to be on oxygen tanks. Struck her as strange.
Despair limits future actions, but knowledge is power. We must know and act in order to stave off despair.
A depressing thread followed by an uplifting video today:
Writer Matthew Todd wrote,
"Sooner or later we're going to have to face the reality that conservatism and capitalism are killing us. It's not a debate. It's a fact. It's literally happening right now in front of our eyes. If you can't see it, you either don't understand it, or you are intentionally lying to yourself. It seems that we would rather all die than face this terrible inconvenient truth."
That provoked environmentalist Stephen Barlow to respond at length:
"We're in a dire climate and ecological emergency, which is going to lead to the collapse of our civilization unless we urgently change direction, and hardly anyone realizes the seriousness. It is now being framed by those committed to business as usual (BaU), as if climate activists are overreacting, catastrophizing. No, the situation is far worse and far more dire than most could imagine, as Peter Kalmus has been trying to point out. We find ourselves in a dire situation. Yet only a small proportion of people really understand how dire the situation really is, and most are in some level of denial. How, do you discuss this situation, when most people, to some degree, are in some form of active denial?
The Financial Times posted a video with Margaret Atwood discussing democracy. It's just 6 minutes, and the illustrations (from Jamie Macdonald) really add to it.
She asks if democracy is fragile or resilient, and points out that we might find out as more climate change effects hit closer to home. I like the video - it's short and sweet and might wake people up to the idea that democracy can be lost if we don't work to protect it. But I don't love it. I have some caveats.
Fiona Atkinson, retired teacher, gave a couple of MPs a lesson that they refused to learn:
This is a video that was on the news in October, but then hit TikTok yesterday, so is just now being spread on social media. Funny how that works.
The interviewers are also MPs, something you don't see much of here (except that weird Ford Nation show), and they asked about grey haired protesters. As someone with a few grey hairs sneaking in the mix, I've noticed for years that most of the protesters at marches and rallies are older. They young make the news, but the old make the numbers. I've been one of the youngest ones in the group my whole life - even still! MP McVey ask if it's about having time or wanting a legacy, but Fiona just stays on course that it's about caring about children. They're hoping for a fluff piece about a little old lady full of piss and vinegar, and Fiona kept it on track to be about the science of climate change.
At the end, McVey suggests that Fiona's problem is with the timeline she proposes. I don't think McVey understands what's going on in the world right now!
George Monbiot talked with journalist Rachel Donald of Planet Critical.
In a nutshell, Monbiot has many views in common with Chomsky: People with the money have become the people with the power, and the masses are voting based on "presumed consent," which means we cast a vote before it's clear what they really stand for. Times of equity in the west, were often times of brutality internationally as capitalism is a looting machine. But nation states are a recent introduction that we struggle to see past and assume it has to be like this. Things can change. It's useful to know the people at the top who are commanding or allowing the pilfering to continue, but also be aware that this current structure is the problem. We have made huge sweeping changes in the past, and it can happen again when just a quarter of us recognize that we're in a huge systems crisis. We can all live with sufficiency individually with luxuries once we recognize the benefit of our luxuries being public (everything from healthcare and education to community swimming pools). We're generally good people, but we're a society of altruists governed by psychopaths. Something will change.
Here's the video and a slightly abridged transcript below it.
Changing minds on big issues takes a long time and the work never ends.
Anti-drinking and driving groups appeared in the early 1980s, like MADD, typically made up of survivors or relatives of victims who saw first hand that something must be done to prevent so many disabilities and deaths. I was a teenager at the time, and my circle didn't think twice about driving hammered. I remember people saying things like these boring old ladies should get a life and stop telling us when we can and can't drive! We were all pretty sure we could drive just fine after a few. Who are they to tell us otherwise? Breathalizer legislation was on the books in the 60s, and RIDE programs were legal in the 70s, but it wasn't until MADD came about that we got flooded with school visits and PSAs and then really strict penalties were enacted for drunk driving including jail time! And they we all sobered up about it, realizing our inconvenience in staying the night or going back to get the car in the morning doesn't really warrant potentially taking a life.
Wheelchair ramps weren't an architectural requirement in public buildings until the 90s, but only after people with disabilities and allies fought for their rights to fully participate in society over decades, starting with Judy Heumann's winning lawsuit in 1970 against the NY Board of Ed that was preventing her equal access to the workplace because she uses a wheelchair. That was following by blocking traffic that got a weak bill passed, and then sit-ins that eventually forced politicians to listen and act. Check out Crip Camp, where activist Denise Jacobson said, "You can pass a law, but until you change society's attitude, that law won't mean much." And now we generally agree that everyone should have access to participate fully in society despite any form of disability. Right???
Early AIDS activists watched friends and loved ones die for years before they could get enough of an audience to have an effect on policy. "Sickness and death from HIV/AIDS was brought to a virtual standstill in the USA . . . by a vigorous public health campaign designed not around treating those who became infected, but by preventing infection in the first place." But it took years of activism, from 1979 to 1986, and many celebrities dying and children dying before public health started to issue PSAs, to actually teach the nation how to prevent the spread.
It takes a really long time to convince governments to impose safety measures that, in some way, affect people's freedom to do their own thing. It's not necessarily a bad thing on its own. to be careful about legislation, but it's very frustrating to be living during the activism phase watching so many children get sick. We've got children dying of Covid already. And lots of celebrities. But there's a huge coverup or spin or denial that has people claiming that, for instance, a fatal heart-attack at 13, 17, 27, and 44, all within a day of each other, is totally normal now. When my healthy friend succumbed to a heart attack in his early 60s, people were so fast to say that people die of heart attacks in their 60s all the time!! Instead of, you know, sorry for your loss. It's all ABC: Anything but Covid.
Both are about the new right-wing alliances being formed, and the furthest right political parties we've seen in some time creeping up worldwide.
Monbiot blames the influencers who are feeding the young conspiratorial messages, including Russell Brand (hence the recent repost).
"He appears to have switched from challenging injustice to conjuring phantoms. If, as I suspect it might, politics takes a very dark turn in the next few years, it will be partly as a result of people like Brand. . . . He wastes his talent on tired and discredited tales. . . . Such claims are not just wrong. They are wearyingly, boringly wrong. But, to judge by the figures (he has more than 6 million subscribers on YouTube), the audience loves them. . . .
For the most part, she was someone I greatly admired. I remember watching that infamous SNL episode in 1992, and it provoked me to look into what she was on about. I had no idea. That's what good activism does - it gets people asking questions and reading. She largely got booed and harassed for her efforts. That's what happens in the first stages of activism on an issue. People get mad at you. People don't want to know; they fight the truth. I try to remember that when people are annoyed by my mask before I let them know that the wealthy demand that people around them be masked so they don't have to be. And we're making them money by dying earlier!!
It was another ten years after that SNL episode before the Boston Globe cracked the case on sexual abuse in the church and won a Pulitzer for their efforts. Bringing truth to light takes time, but it can be so hard to be patient.
A mom delegated at a school board meeting in the states about the group, Moms for Liberty. Here's the Tiktok video (but also at the link in case - I wish TikTok embedded more reliably):
@nowthispolitics A mother in Wilson County, TN, read out some of the homophobic and demeaning messages her 6th grade daughter had received at school, simply for identifying as lesbian. The woman, Lindsey Patrick-Wright, was speaking out against a push, led by the far-right group Moms For Liberty, to ban several books in the school district. She also spoke out against a board member who had equated being LGBTQIA+ to mental illness and who had proposed a policy forcing teachers to notify parents if a student came out to them as transgender. #tennessee #LGBTQIA+ #school #news #momsforliberty ♬ [News] Music for news programs 10 mystery solving(1417504) - Takashi
Truth Matters commented:
"What kind of despicable animals take their political wars to the classrooms of public schools? Moms for Liberty my ass; they should be called Moms for Tyranny. Schools should be sanctuaries for learning, but the MAGA Cartel has turned classrooms into killing fields with their inaction on gun control. Not satisfied with that, they want to turn them into Christian Nationalist indoctrination centers, where hate, homophobia and racism is injected into the curriculum."
Earlier this month, The Hill explained how Moms for Liberty is an extremist organization started in Florida in 2021:
Initially focused on mask mandates and other Covid-19 restrictions in schools, the organization is now dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by . . . empowering parents to defend their parental rights. . . . More than half of the 500 candidates endorsed by the organization were elected to school boards . . . a major player in the war against so-called 'woke' instruction related to gender identity, sexuality, race and racism. . . .
"A man can't cure and know at the same time. So let's cure as quickly as we can. That's the more urgent job."
This hit me as particularly poignant as we're still coping with wafting smoke from so many fires which is making us face the reality of the situation, which might render us immobile. We can't figure out an exit strategy from climate change - it's all too big and complex and overwhelming; we can only try to keep helping one another as best we can while we're here.
Dr. Rieux recognizes that the vastness of pain and suffering is horrific, and we can't think about it without being paralyzed by the thought. His tactic is to focus on whomever needs his help right in front of him, trying to help one patient after another for 20 hours each day, doing his utmost to maintain his personal integrity at the peak of the plague, Camus' allegory for fascism creeping up on the unsuspecting. We have very little control over the big picture, so mainly focus on being a good person, helping in any way you can.
Climate change is devastating. The knowledge of it is paralyzing. We can't solve it, but we can still try to slow it down or at least try not to make it too much worse. While we do that, we have to focus on the here and now, on helping in whatever way we can - to heal, teach, console, befriend... We can't get stuck in fretting. In others words, we have to stay in the present, with what's right in front of us, instead of the future of unknowns.
It's the 80s all over again. We've got a killer virus that people are largely ignoring despite a small group of people continuing to fight for protections and medications. We've got a big conflict with Russia that could affect us in a nuclear sort of way. And now we've got a lone man walking into a university Philosophy of Gender class with intent to do some damage. He stabbed the professor and two students before being caught by police.
I was writing an essay for class while this happened on Wednesday, and I was sitting in a large auditorium class in my undergrad during the Montréal Massacre.
Here's one student's account of the events:
It took no time at all before we started hearing the lone wolf rhetoric. And people talk about mental illness and if this attacker is the cause of this type of violence.
He's just a player or a pawn, depending on his connections and motives.
Henry Madison, just some random dude on twitter, wrote an interesting bit on concerts and the enmeshment of generations. I disagree with several of his claims below:
"Imagine a 77-year old favourite of the boomers’ parents, playing at Woodstock in the 1960s. The oldest performer at Woodstock was Ravi Shankar, who was 49. (He didn’t like hippies and never did it again.) There’s a serious point here. A 77-year old artist playing at Woodstock would have been born in 1892. That would be the equivalent of Louis Armstrong or Jelly Roll Morton playing there. We have artists at Glastonbury this week approaching 80 years of age. None of this is ageism, I should add. If people want to keep playing into their 80s, good luck to them. But we’re talking about headlining music festivals, festivals predominantly (like Woodstock) designed for the young. To me this means unhealthy things.
Blondie What’s said about the counterculture movement of the 1960s was that it was profoundly anti-establishment. Today the closest beliefs are labelled neoliberalism. It’s strange the bedfellows beliefs keep. And who invented neoliberalism? The same boomers. That was the same movement, as it morphed into a highly profitable middle and old age. The richest generation in all of history, by a mile. Anti-establishment beliefs were great business: the boomers dismantled many of society’s institutions, and then privatised them. Most of the corporate behemoths that now dominate our lives in our ‘neoliberal’ societies were set up by boomers, who also profited the most from them. They monetised the wreckage of their earlier anti-establishment assault.
I don’t think people see this clearly at all.
She started writing this book after being at a talk in June 2019, at the start of Covid, in a packed church full of lots of young people there to see her and David Suzuki and Avi Lewis. She spoke about having hope while facing facts and the Green New Deal, and then at the end, a couple grade 12 girls told if that if she hadn't talked about hope, they would have given up.
Her definition of hope is,
"the commitment to protect all that is good for the future generations and the planet, knowing that you can't control the outcome, but put your hand out anyway and touch the universe when you can, and have faith that others are doing the same--faith that you're not alone."
Here are her three major lessons somewhat paraphrased:
At the heart of Covid minimisation lies a Social Darwinist assault on medicine. It emanates from the implicit neo-Darwinism lying at the core of neoliberalism, which assumes all societal progress is driven by unfettered market competition.
Government intervention in the natural competitive order undermines market competition, destroying society by propping up uncompetitive entities that ought to be permitted to be liquidated by natural attrition. We cannot repeat the mistakes of the Soviet block and its unnatural state interference in capitalist competitive marketplaces. A state lead moonshot approach to solving the Covid crisis will see the West suffer a downfall like the Soviet Union. While liquidation of the uncompetitive is painful short term, it will be for the betterment of society in the long run: it is "creative destruction." Costly interventions such as lockdowns, masks, air filtration and next-gen vaccines must be opposed for being violations of Nature. Unnatural interventions put the state in debt while creating immunity debt. It is better to get the creative destruction by the liquidation of the uncompetitive done upfront than suffer such dept-creating interventions that prolong pandemics, thus aggravating suffering long-term.
I'm a bit of a social media addict, but I quietly wandered away from Facebook last summer when too many people I know in real life were making fun of people wearing masks. A quick peek back finds far too much support for this inane convoy making a mess of Ottawa. It's bad enough having to deal with that unnerving feeling in person, my blood running cold as it's explained to me that N95s are too uncomfortable to bother with, and that we have to make peace with death and the death of others. We have to live our lives!! The lack of concern for how overwhelmed hospitals are and childhood hospitalizations increasing has me reeling.
And we can live our lives for so much longer, and with much greater pleasure from good health, if we get vaccinated, wear better masks, and keep buildings well ventilated. It's baffling to me the level of denial and the weird rationalizations people are making around the pandemic. I hear that, like me, people are terrified for their lives and the lives of our children, but denial just makes it so much worse. It IS possible to mitigate the risks and avoid the costs with just so little effort!
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| Questionable numbers here, but estimates still show N95 give better protection. |
The "truckers convoy" is a perfect symbol of misdirected discontent. I put it in quotation marks because most of this gang aren't truckers, and most truckers have denounce the whole shenanigans, with over 90% vaccinated. It's really a white nationalist grift and a distraction from worse events allowed to continue.
