[555] Climate Silence

A series I find wildly inspiring is Years of Living Dangerously. It’s not because it ever teaches me anything I don’t already know. It’s that it takes a camera into the meeting room where climate activists discuss details and field questions from the masses. You can begin to peel away much of the nonsense that obscures why there is or isn’t action taken and the, in my view extremely hopeless, mental pits people fall into to protect their views.

A basic premise I assume when I go into an argument or approach learning about some topic is that everything is connected. When Wikipedia first arrived I remember clicking though every word I didn’t know and being fascinated about just generally learning and reading in no specific direction. To fluidly access windows and doors into worlds I’d never seen before held little utility but to keep me intrigued or distracted, but it’s a shared window that analogizes how our brains work.

A gentleman holds a presentation to talk to Texans about climate change. Their concerns are that “Tax feels like someone’s taking something away from me” and “If the oil companies’ costs go up isn’t it going to cost Texas jobs?” One person pointed the finger at China. The presenter’s father said, “We need fossil fuels” ten seconds before saying he’d absolutely use renewables yet does not have access to them.

Without fail, people think small and selfish yet don’t draw from the larger world to help fix their true concern. You can’t only care about your little farm and your oil industry job. The deeper truth, in the scheme of things, is that your job isn’t secure and the planet you inhabit will eventually force your hand. The gentleman whose conception of taxes resembles that of a child is going to have an even harder time dealing with these conditions because his feelings are always going to be in the way.

I suppose for me these scenarios make me think of hypocrisy. I’m every ounce of an armchair humanitarian. I try to move my mind into spaces that I think might shed light on better ways forward. I look at the motivated and urgent students holding meetings for their townsfolk and think it’s generally in vain. Stupid and insecure people have never been fixed with logical discussion of hundreds of variables to consider. They just have their feelings. In that the presenter brought his family along maybe spoke to his only real impact in that they’re sympathetic to him if not the world of facts.

To extend this further, this is why I always blame people for their silence. Your family and friends are moved by you. You’re responsible for them. When I write, even if I bitch until the day I die about not seeing your impact reflected in the social media space enough, I have to believe you take something with you into the rest of your worlds. In actuality, I could set up a table and grab a megaphone and recite statistics and urge people to care, but I’ve never seen the problem as a lack of that kind of quasi-activism.

The problem is that we don’t concern ourselves with the whole. We pretend one area of our lives is off limits. We think there’s dignity and safety in cordoning off the parts we’re scared or ashamed of. If I think I’m perhaps a hypocrite in how I exercise my time, now you’re hearing about it. If I’m seeing a connection about my concerns regarding fascism, ignorance, laziness, and quickly evaporating time and spirit, you get to know the roots of my disappointing study attempt. By allowing yourself a holistic view of your problems and place in the world, while you carry more weight, it’s also more powerful when you try to swing it around.

Maybe then you’re not just poised for “dumb internet fights” you’re protecting shared intellectual space from complicit ignorance. Maybe you’re not busy and hopeless, but invigorating the mundane with your heightened awareness. For that, I think of the last concert I went to. An hour and a half was spent by most of the crowd waiting for the band to show up. I read articles and listened to a podcast. Yes, it was weird and yes I stood out, but staring at an empty stage for that long seemed even weirder. Much of what I think a person consists of is as much what they’re prepared to do and are aware of that they can do. I can read and listen and then rock the fuck out and then have a salient conversation about ethics on the walk back to the car. The superficially different realms are connected by my agency.

This means it’s always the right time. You can respond to this blog and we can talk for a solid week digging up sources and making plans. You can share this with your more motivated and talkative friends. You can seriously consider in a deeper way things you may feel hypocritical about or afraid of. Every moment, right now, the world is ours to engage with or ignore. If you’re not even aware of your larger obligation, let alone the endless utility you can derive from engaging as such, you’ll be the lowly conservative cliché who only knows how to feel their way about in the dark.

Guilt seems key. Do you wait for something external to force you and then try to cope and change? I suppose it’s anyone’s guess if you invite the pain in now if you’ll be able to alleviate it. I’m perhaps a standing example of that. I’m worried about the conversations I’ll be having with myself at 40 or 50 about my actions or lack thereof. Does my writing ever suggest I’m particularly happy or healthy lol? Of course I am, but I don’t take to the page to wax about butterflies. I think I’m better at coping and continually talking about soul-crushing and harrowing things, if only because of the visceral reactions I get from all the people who aren’t.

Or maybe you are, so do it even more. Maybe you have your own roundabout way of fixing something you see as integral to the general cultural problem, so let me know about it. I’m with Jordan Peterson who says the religious underpinnings, the moral truths and motivations that bound us together have been blown apart and it speaks to why we’re ravenous for Harry Potter or Marvel stories to help realign us. I love the idea of music being disparate harmonies speaking to something transcendent and spine tingling. That’s how I can retain respect for story tellers and musicians; when you tie your work to your honest struggle for an individual voice and perspective that retains all the humanity that birthed it.

Perhaps the myth is that there’s no telling your impact. I’m telling you your impact every time I write. It’s frustration. It’s loneliness. It’s denial. It is pain and death and fear that are hardly hidden by the next celebration. Part of me wishes it would at least be idealism so we could respect that an idea was even represented. If you hate to “fight” and “debate,” then just talk. Talk to your secret followers and admirers. Talk yourself in and out of emotional and intellectual holes. Talk to show yourself that you have something to say or shed some light on why you don’t.

[373] Middle Ground Zero

I want to talk about the idea of “the middle way.” I also want to criticize ideas and statements that masquerade as the reasonable adult way of understanding the world.

Initially, I think about the ideal political situation. The idea of negotiating a center that keeps extreme positions at either end, and the reasonable people basically being able to agree on a common premise. In a democracy, it's theorized that rational actors with the perfect information would make decisions in service to their best interests. Clearly, that works every time. I think there are places, like our political realm, where that idea, that there is indeed a middle ground, does a lot of work in misleading our cultural conversation.

Another easy one is health. Would you rather be healthy or have cancer? Why not shoot for the middle ground and we just give you diabetes and a broken leg. It's manageable and not immediately life threatening, right? But no, you'll insist that you want to be healthy. Most sane people would because when it comes to the stark reality of “I feel like shit” it's so very clear what an ideal situation would look like.

I was reading over a reddit thread, specifically this one “hate the liberals” guy's comments to people expressing frustration over Obama's new bill to lower student debt interest rates. Examples of his comments amount to “you were an adult, you shouldn't have signed the loan,” “You're a fucking retard thinking the government owes you anything,” “Education is not free (n)or a right,” “I made better decisions than you, studied something better than you, I don't want to pay for you,” and “you entitled parasites don't seem to understand life isn't fair and that not everyone succeeds.” There are severely worse comments, but this will do for now.

Let's respond line by line. This idea that “you were an adult” seems to say that “now that you're a reasonable and wise individual with no unfair barriers and perfect information, you picked the objectively worst thing to do to yourself in this situation.” I, at least, had about as much choice to go to college as I have to currently work at McDonalds. It's amazing how many parents bought the idea that college meant job and opportunities well before their kids did. It amazes me to think that we'd admonish someone for, what's been touted as the “adult” thing to do, go to college, for incurring the costs that became normalized at all levels of society, in order to do so.

It's not being “reasonable” to lean on the idea that “well, people are adults!” Adults in a context. Or children who are as old as adults who've never been taught or engaged with by a reasonably better interpretation of the word “adult.”

The idea that the government doesn't owe you anything is particularly interesting. In a representative democracy, the government owes you everything. The government owes you its very jobs. If the majority of people with unreasonable crippling debt call on the government to do something about it, the government should respond. This accounting and thought experiment has been done hundreds of times. Things like relocating agribusiness and oil subsidies. Why begrudge the guy who tried to get educated and be responsible instead of writing angry letters to the banks? What did the government owe them? Whatever it was, it's still being paid.

Education not being free nor a right is a statement of fact. But, more to the point, nothing is a right besides the right to die. And then, only if you don't drag that phrasing into the political arena! Rights are bread from understanding and struggle. When you have access, ability, and intention, a “right” starts to manifest in louder and louder fashion. How many blacks and women have been explained to them the rights they don't have in our democracies over the years?

There are things you state because they are true. There are things you state, while incidentally true, only serve to promote the status quo or deliberately ignore other avenues. To say something like “don't touch that pot, it's hot” is not the same kind of factual claim as “don't complain because the government doesn't owe you anything.” The second statement is the kind of folded argument “logic” you get from religious types. “Well, you can't prove there's not a god!” Okay...true, but that usually has absolutely nothing to do with why you think that god doesn't want me to have an abortion. If you don't want to get burned, you don't touch the pot. If you want a different financial obligation, allegedly you appeal to your representatives.

The next lines are about personal responsibility. I don't know how you can talk of responsibility without speaking to what society considers responsible. It goes back to simply going to college in the first place. That's what higher paying jobs expect. That's what they did, that's their standard, and for a great many things, college isn't simply a giant waste of money. But, not only are kids in schools screwed going in, but when they're out, a lot of the jobs they were shooting for, say in medicine, are proving less than useful in paying back their loans anymore than the art student can. There's an underlying societal/governmental problem that makes a truly “responsible” decision, at best difficult, and at worst practically arbitrary.

Finally, the idea that not everyone succeeds and that life isn't fair. Maybe you come across someone who's been in a serious car accident. Do you pull up next to them and yell “life's not fair fucko!” and speed off in celebration of your ability to better avoid being in accidents? Probably not. It's a statement of “fact” that doesn't really speak to whether or not the accident happened on a bridge that wasn't reinforced or a road that wasn't properly paved. It ignores the poor car quality standards that could have reduced it to a fender bender instead of someone bleeding out on the pavement.

There are levels of responsibility and “fair” that we install. Also, we install them for reasons. If you want to speed, you don't argue with the cop that it's not fair he pulled you over. Why make the care able to go so fast if I can't use it! It's fair to assume that most people most of the time should try to drive in ways that don't make it more likely for you to die arbitrarily. We'll leave aside Montana's odd speed experiment, imposing speed limits and seeing an increase in death, with that analogy.

There is a, I don't know what else to call it but “religious zealotry” that people, at some level or another subscribe to that they coat in unhelpful and unnecessary “facts” to try and sound reasonable or advocating for “something in the middle.” These are idealists not because they understand what's actually ideal, but because they are allowed to create and defend to the death what they personally define as ideal. They subscribe to axioms about age or habits of “good leaders” instead of describing the context under which different ideas are formed. They appeal to reputation and common ethics above cause and effect evidence.

These are the people who say one of the dumbest and most popular statements right now, “there are some scientists that don't believe in global warming.” If you watch the episode of “Years of Living Dangerously,” try not to throw something through your TV when the pastor of one of the country's biggest churches argues that “because you haven't addressed my points!” He's neither convinced nor impressed. It's a guy you can't persuade ice melts, but you'll try, until you don't know whether you hate him or yourself more.

The “middle way,” to me, is not making these empty aphorisms about “life” or “how it works.” Nor is it taking a bath in shit, then in honey, and showing off how beautiful you look and awesome you smell. Put the shit in the garden and the honey on the toast. Understand that every time you say “Democrats suck” you're not really saying anything. The middle is about perspective, not leveraging bad or empty ideas against each other. It means you can advocate for equal opportunity without bankrupting potentially vital pieces of infrastructure. It means you're influenced by history and examples that aren't feeling laden anecdotes. It means you can respect when the responsibility is truly yours, you know, like for going to school, and when you should expect the burden for certain things, like how it's paid for, to be on everyone. Every old person on Medicaid who complains about entitled millennials should unironically drop dead on the spot.

“Objective” is not a negotiation. You don't want just a little bit of cancer. In the same way you don't track increasing tuition for 30 years, for no other reasons beyond corruption, and blame kids for “being adults who made the poor decision to pay for an education.”