Who Will Be Left to Fight For You?

My friend and I were sitting on the dock by a lake in New Hampshire, watching a neon-crimson sun set and tone the silvery waves pink. Faced with the vista of the place where I've spent a good piece of every summer of my life, I was ranting about climate change with a catch in my voice, with everything right before my eyes reminding me of what I myself may stand to lose thanks to governments' inaction on climate change. Lately I'm especially scornful of the part where world leaders have resolved to become totally fossil-fuel-free by the year 2100, while scientists are informing us that we have 15-17 years in which to curb those emissions--essentially, we must cut off our fossil-fuel addiction by 2030. Beyond that window of time, our planetary survival chances plummet as irreversible tipping points are triggered and runaway global warming takes off.

That gives us approximately a 70-year difference between world leaders' projections and our planet's requirements. A 70-year margin of error is ludicrously large odds to play with, with stakes so high.

In 2030, I will be about 31 years old. Were I to pursue the American dream, I might be settled down with a career and spouse, perhaps thinking about or expecting children. In a world where we have failed to reach our carbon-emissions reduction targets, how many of my generation would dare send forth young lives, would want to bear children on the cusp of a world that is effectively doomed? Will my friends and peers parent a generation that will grow up in a world that their ancestors failed to save, where they will never have even the illusion of a chance? Even now, if I were thirty and considering starting a family, I would be wary of bringing children into a world with so uncertain a future--or of even the chance of one.

Oh certainly, the earth will go on, and as I am middle-class and live fairly comfortably, I could conceivably raise children with a decent modicum of safety, even in 2030. We could huddle in our gated communities and watch the Global South burn and flood, watch the oceans encroach on our shores, watch temperatures and death tolls rise. We could wait in the first world while Bangladesh sees fertile soil impregnated with salt water, while Kiribati and Tuvalu and Nauru sink under the waves, while ever-stronger storms ravage our coasts and droughts desiccate our grasslands. I could watch from my armchair as climate refugees spill over every border, as wars break out over the last dregs of natural resources. I and my futureless children might be okay, for a little while.

But it will catch up with us. If I chose, my thirty-year-old self could battle for a facsimile of normal life, remembering the days when food was easy and plentiful and we did not curse the sun and rain. If I chose, I could get away with denial even as we fail our climate commitments and cross those final tipping points, as we release colossal methane deposits when the tundra melts, as Arctic sheet ice disappears for good, as species vanish like clockwork, every hour a death knell for untold wonders of the natural world.

One day it will be in my backyard. It will be my life in the balance. Perhaps the day when a storm rips through my manicured suburban home, or the day I cannot get the medical supplies I need to treat the chronic illnesses I have. Perhaps climate wars will reach my doorstep, or perhaps food will be too scarce to rely on even in the comfortable padding of the first world.

Perhaps their lives have no bearing on ours now. Perhaps it really doesn't matter to us whether they live and die. But if we do not fight for them now, who will be left to fight for us? Who will be left to fight for you?

That famous poem could now be repurposed, that one that begins, "First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out. Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out. And then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me." Could we not rewrite Martin Niemoller's lines: "First it came for the islanders. Then it came for the global poor. Then it came for the coastal dwellers. And then it came for me..." Like the scourge of Nazism, climate change is a threat that slowly grows to encompass not only the groups that are distant and immaterial to our minds but finally us as well, going unnoticed and unprotested by the majority until we too realized we are in its crosshairs. Though it can be argued that the Nazi ideology was also a human creation, born of the terrific mishandling of post-World War I Europe, but climate change is even more so a direct product of our actions. Yet in the same way, it is an insidious beast, its progression easily masked, not obvious to those not watching.

In fifth grade my interest was snared by the Titanic, and I can tell you how the ship sank because the White Star Line cut corners and how the so-called watertight compartments weren't watertight because the rivets that held the metal sheets together were cooked until they were too hot and turned brittle. The captain ignored warnings from ships who'd already run into trouble, kept the engines at full throttle, and when the Titanic's lookouts finally saw the iceberg and called the alarm, they were too late because no one had even bothered to supply them with binoculars. Now, though the icebergs are still warning us of impending disaster, we'll have melted them all by the time our final undoing comes, so what kill us will be something only the ignored and maligned Cassandras truly foresaw in its entirety. And we're lacking cultural binoculars for the big picture, making it harder to sell the urgency of fighting to a pack of rabid skeptics who won't believe the icebergs are worth their worry until their living rooms are flooded and they can feel the floor of this sinking ship tilting underneath their feet.

This mentality--your problem's not my problem until it's my problem--is another that can be attributed to the dominance of the capitalist ideology. If individual benefit always trumps the collective good and if self-interest is the only motivator that matters, then the idea that our lives are all linked, that what befalls a person in Burkina Faso or Fiji should matter to a person in the United States, is anathema. Protecting the global commons has been made to seem a less logical proposition than exploiting them.

An observation by Rebecca Solnit that struck me was that for a generation raised on TV and a fear of the "wild"--the unclean, the unpackageable, the uncontainable and untamable--environmentalism can hardly be a cause close to our hearts when we have never learned the value of the earth we are losing piece by piece. Our parents tell stories of the way they would play outside for hours as children, would wander in the woods and explore creeks and mountains. But lacking that connection, do we even know what we have at stake? Does my generation have the investment in a land and a world many of us never connected with or learned to appreciate? Sure, that river or that mountain range is beautiful, but it's just a pretty picture. It'll still exist on Google Images and in travel books' glossy photographs. For those of us who didn't grow up with houses by the lake or forest, who didn't have "outside" as the playground that shaped our childhoods, "nature" may just be another cyberscape navigable by proxy if ever we wanted to experience it.

And someday, failing a turnaround of drastic proportions, that virtual-reality proxy of the natural world may indeed be all we have left--for the lucky ones.

Fourth of July

Happy Fourth of July. Or “Happy Unbridled Patriotism Day,” as I’ve coined it.

For the last two Unbridled Patriotism Days, I happened to be in Norway and was able to fully skirt the sudden explosions of red-white-and-blue on every corner. Today, though, I am writing from Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, in which everyone was dutifully decked out to the nines in all patriotic garb (and there I was in my Anti-Flag t-shirt, wondering if anyone would notice…). It is a little alarming how closely US-flag-bodysuits resemble prison jumpsuits, incidentally. The stripes of both represent bars that imprison people, and I wouldn’t want to wear either.

New Hampshire has long been a swing state, colored blue on the Republican-vs.-Democrat map of the States but with fiercely libertarian undercurrents, hence all the don’t-tread-on-me stickers I’ve seen. Hence, also, the customary deluge of candidates New Hampshire experiences when elections roll around--today, I saw Chris Christie and his cheer squad out in force, followed close behind by Marco Rubio’s. I actually shook hands with Rubio, who did not look at me and quickly gravitated towards an older man in military garb. Ben Carson, who did not attend in person, sent to the parade an entire bus--Greyhound-sized, a real travel bus--emblazoned with his name and face, as well as a circling motorcycle handing out Carson paraphernalia. There were also a small Martin O’Malley delegation and several Hillary Clinton signs.

The Fourth of July parade itself trailed to a tired conclusion with a pair of young children holding a Winnipesaukee Republicans banner, looking exhausted or possibly just bored. With this wind-down, many parade-watchers defected to swarm around the real live presidential candidates, done with the seemingly endless procession of antique military hardware and servicemembers, trucks, tractors, bands, local businesses, assorted teams, troops, and clubs of the local kids--including a float from the regional high school, whose express purpose in the parade was to make visible their call for Jimmy Fallon to be the speaker at the class of 2016’s graduation. A half-dozen military floats or contingents passed by too, one with children riding in the back of a pickup truck and wearing beige US Army t-shirts.

This is the New Hampshire I did not glimpse as a child during my summers here--behind the postcard-perfect bay and park and tchotchke stores, this is a state with a certain flavor of American exceptionalism, a worship of the military, a faith in the shiny vision of the country they are glad people die for.  A church here in town bears a sign affirming the US above God: America Bless God, it reads--or commands?--instead of the traditional and perhaps more humble opposite.

Elsewhere were screamed the words United We Stand,  printed on dozens of flag-adorned t-shirts and red-white-and-blue posters. Perhaps we would, I thought, but what about that invigorating statement’s corollary: Divided We Fall?

As the town from which hailed a police chief broadly condemned for his racist remarks about President Obama--the chief was roundly denounced by his local constituents, as well--Wolfeboro ought to be quite aware of the divisions here, the chasms of race and inequality and poverty that undercut not only any facade of unity, but perhaps also the possibility of it, in this starry-eyed striped nation. Another sign on a military float, reminding us All Gave Some, Some Gave All, led me to finish the phrase with Rise Against’s song lyrics from “Survivor Guilt”: all gave some, some gave all/ but for what? I want to know!

For what, indeed? Observing the signs or event postings thanking soldiers for their service, I wondered how that obsequious thanks felt to the ears of the sole parader hoisting a Veterans For Peace flag, if not the rest of the veterans arrayed there. I’ve read quite a bit on some veterans’ deep resentment of the way our culture offers them constant thanks for their service--ostensibly for protecting us--without considering what that cost them and what it continues to cost (i.e. we like to “support our troops” but rarely follow through well when they return home wounded or haunted). Did they give it all so that we could continue to wave these stars and stripes, to swarm smarmy presidential candidates, to feel self-assured and superior and blindly celebratory? Or did they give it all just to be cannon fodder, pieces in a machine that chewed them up, spat them out, and asked for more?

What nation are we, what kind of delusions must we twist our minds into, that ours is a legacy--past, present, and future--of which we can be proud? We are not the land of the free, and I don't believe we are the home of the brave, either, so much as the land of the very, very afraid. 

Earlier this year a girl in my English class gave a speech about patriotism: how to her it doesn’t mean ignoring our bloody, vicious past and burying our current wrongs under a blanket of flags, but that to be patriotic, to love this country, is to recognize and appreciate the potential we have, the good we could do--and then accomplish it.

It was decently convincing. That to be patriotic is to believe in and celebrate not what we are or have been, but what we could be. How we could make the world more fair, more safe, more beautiful, more sustainable, more peaceful. That we could be a country and a generation we could be proud of.

I want to believe we could be better.

I’d like to.

But some days, some places, some moods--all I can see is how far we have left to go, in how very little time.

Watch Greece: Soon-to-be Another Casualty of Neoliberalism?

I turned in a research paper on Venezuela a few weeks ago, and my history teacher took slight issue with my statement that the IMF and World Bank are the agents of implementation for neoliberal restructuring programs. She commented, “Not so much anymore…” and I shrugged and conceded: All right, maybe their era is closing. Maybe the IMF hasn’t got so much wrecking-ball energy anymore. All right.

Now, I’m taking that back, too.

I’ve been trying to understand what has been going down in Greece, but I believe I only squinted at the New York Times articles, saw “left-wing government,” “anti-austerity,” and “protests,” and nodded approvingly. I would have admitted that I wasn’t quite sure what was happening there. It turns out that was an unwise ignorance to choose.

Greece is the latest country to land in the IMF’s neoliberal crosshairs. Recently elected left-wing Syriza government is seeing its campaign promises drift away from reality, backed against a wall by the European Commission and pressure to stay in the Eurozone. The fight has been portrayed as dichotomous in the US media: either Greece can play by Angela Merkel’s austerity rules, or it can withdraw from the Eurozone and go it alone. Only a few days ago, I received some emailed petitions saying there is a third way: Merkel could be pressured into making the terms less harsh for Greece, and it could remain in the Eurozone. That was my first hint that the Greece debacle is something to keep an eye on. It’s not going away, and it’s more momentous than simply a little country in dire economic straits.

Today I learn that the IMF has got its hands all tangled up in this situation, too. That’s a flashing red warning sign, if anything is--the International Monetary Fund, with their glorious legacy of forcing economic restructuring packages down the throats of countries desperate for aid, in debt and disaster? Latin America’s ruthless godfather--or puppeteer? The IMF may not be the hulking steamroller that it was in the closing decades of the twentieth century, dealing toxic “aid” to Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, and many others, but it is far from obsolete, much less innocuous.

It is more than a struggle for a better economy or even different economic bailout methods now taking place in Greece. I should have seen it sooner. This is another revolt against the neoliberal world order--with other potential revolters, Ireland, Spain, Portugal perhaps, watching--and the world had better not look away, nor allow another democracy to succumb to the rapacious appetite of that infamous neoliberal disciple of capital and corporatism, the IMF. And behind the IMF, we cannot forget, stands always the driving fist of the United States.

Given the urgency with which we need change in the global economic system, before it sells off our planet and our future to the highest corporate bidders, Greece’s struggle could be a tipping point--a challenge to the ruling order, a move toward the unraveling of the certain disaster we are headed for, or another failure, another nail in our global coffin.

Read this article, posted at the AFL-CIO blog: it has the gritty details, and an expanded overview of the heavy consequences of this fight.

http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Global-Action/Economics-as-Religion