And I’ll add a semi-related fable.
There were a group of 5 monkeys that all lived on a tropical island; they survived by climbing trees to get bananas.
One day, the monkeys are taken to a lab and placed in an enclosure that somewhat captured the original environment. The only difference was that if any monkey climbed the tree, they’d all get soaked with freezing cold water from a sprinkler system. The monkeys were forced to eat simulated banana paste from a stainless steel bowl on the ground.
Every day for the first few months, at least one monkey would try to climb the tree - either to forage or just for fun, it’s irrelevant - and all the monkeys would end up soaking wet and freezing. It got to the point where if any monkey even went towards the tree, the rest would attack it. Eventually, the monkeys left the tree alone.
So the scientists removed 2 of the monkeys, and added 3 more that were freshly captured. These monkeys had no idea about the cold water, so would inevitably try to climb the tree - resulting in them being savagely attacked by the remaining original 3 monkeys.
Eventually, without even knowing why, the new monkeys left the tree alone.
The scientists then removed the 3 original monkeys, and replaced them with 3 more fresh monkeys, who were of course attacked when they tried to climb the tree.
Soon, though no monkey had ever been wet or cold in its entire existence (within this enclosure), they’d all avoid the tree that they’d depended on their entire life “because that’s how it goes.”
It’s time to stop attacking our fellow monkeys, and break out of this lab. I want some god-damn bananas.
What can you do? Build community. Work locally. That’s what you can do. Don’t try to start nationally; get a ground game going, plant the grass seeds and grow that grassroots.
Change in a country of 340M people is literally a lifetime of work, and thinking that you’re going to do it overnight, and giving up because it takes effort is the problem.
The problem is that I’m trying to build community - I’ve been trying to build community; nobody wants to act. Everyone agrees we’re fucked, and yet nobody wants to do ANYTHING.
My town wasn’t affected by Ferguson. My town wasn’t affected by masks, unless you wore one. My town’s mayor is named Billy Bob. We have an annual Catfish Festival.
If I wasn’t sentimental, I’d sell the place and move to Luxembourg, or New Zealand. Somewhere far away with a nice view for when you (not you personally, mind you) mother fuckers ruin it all.
I totally understand. Really. I live in the same kind of town. (Unfortunately, the local town festival is large enough–despite the size of the town—that describing it would dox me.) It’s super disheartening. I wore a P100 repirator in public through most of the pandemic. I think that there’s maybe five black families in the whole town, and people were really hostile to the BLM protests. …Despite also being very aware of how corrupt the local sheriff is. (And still voting for the same fucker every year because he’s Republican!)
But you can’t get a progressive–or leftist–candidate elected without having a very strong local organization first. And that means, yes, years of feeling like you’re beating your head against a wall. And maybe it never works in your town, but maybe it does in the next town over.
Here’s something else to mull over - if it’s not working in your town, what makes you think that they’re going to go along with that kind of thing when it’s top-down? This is the problem of politics; you need to build enough of a consensus that you have a majority, or super majority, in order to get shit done. Simply being factually correct (e.g., climate collapse, pandemic, etc.) isn’t enough, unless what you want is a totalitarian, authoritarian gov’t.
I don’t think they will, hence the depression.
How much time do you think we have before we all get turbo fucked by climate change?
Because I’d wager we have less than enough time to build this community that people have been trying to build for decades, achieve our goals and implement them nationally. That shit would take a century. I mean by all means work on it. I just think that being snuggly confident in it working is kind of stupid.
To me, it seems the only real solutions that have a chance of actually making things better when all factors are considered, are the ones that involve revolution or sudden societal collapse. So to that end, they are very all or nothing commitments, and it’s hard to get anyone to commit to that.
About -25 years, give or take. That is, we’re not fucked yet, but that’s because the “find out” part takes so long to be really noticeable after the “fuck around” part. I think that we’re way past the point of being able to avert climate collapse, and I’m not even convinced that we can slow it down at this point. I think the best case scenario is building infrastructure that will allow as many people as possible to survive despite the damage we’ve done, and continue to do, to the environment.
I think that what Biden has been working towards is helpful, but absolutely inadequate, and I also recognize that any more drastic changes aren’t feasible in our political system. Or feasible without kicking off a real, armed revolution. Despite that, I think that we still need to try, rather than just rolling over and waiting for death.
I think we agree on almost everything, I just feel like yes, it will take too long to be worthy of the effort. We will be dead before any real benefits can take off. I think armed revolution is the only long term “solution” because any community you build now, in the next few years will be too small and weak to sustain itself during the crash.
But there isn’t any real solution to the problems. Just making things slightly more comfy for a few people.