Coming Home to Roost
We should have seen it coming.
Here is why those who like to point to the progress civilization has made over the past few hundred years, as a reason to be hopeful for the future, are wrong.
Or, more colorfully, pollyannaish.
Climate change is real and the results—though they may be mixed—are going to be devastating across the board but, of course, most devastating for the lesser among us. Climate change will be far more destructive for the countries who will have a more difficult time adapting.
A century of armed conflict in the poorest regions of the world has given rise to kleptocracy, piracy, famine and displacement. I grew up believing that crime doesn’t pay. That’s not true. Crime pays.
Ask the Nigerians who swindled the state of Washington’s employment security. Ask the eastern Europeans and Russians probing into every nook and cranny of America’s internet backbone. Ask every robo-scammer incessantly trying to part you from your money.
A century of the so-called First World economies exploiting, extracting and dumping on those not in the First World has left many nations in the world on the verge of environmental or economic collapse. Left those nations crippled, weak and dependent.
Today the U.S. Senate voted not to investigate the insurrection of January 6th.
What does that have to do with my bleak portrait of our global issues? The insurrectionists were hoping to overthrow our most recent election and install their strongman as ‘president-for-life’. The insurrectionists were (and are) enamored with the idea of an iron-fisted ruler who they believe will carry out their authoritarian fantasies. American insurrectionists—a wild collection of white supremacists, garden variety racists, disaster capitalists, Confederate sympathizers and those hoping to capitalize on chaos—fear, above all else, the influx of immigrants and refugees.
It doesn’t matter if they were once, or even recently, immigrants or refugees themselves. Now that they have arrived, some are happy to bar the door and vilify the ones who try to follow them. Most of the insurrectionists—who were federally trespassing, ferociously beating Capitol Hill police who were putting up any kind of resistance and trying to bust through doors into the inner sanctum of our government—were middle aged, middle class and white.
Oh, and angry.
But not all of them. Ali (Akbar) Alexander, for instance.
Of course, Alexander, like Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson and every other right-wing agitator with a megaphone and a burgeoning bank account from the selling of untruths was too much of a chickenshit to actually storm the Capitol Building. He reminds me of the kid at every elementary who would egg on the fist fight but make sure he was far enough from the action that he couldn’t get collared by the principal. Sounds like most of the loudest voices on the right.
Nazi-like Fascism is a threat around the globe. (I added ‘Nazi-like’ as a descriptor because fascism—by itself—is not as abhorrent as the fascism practiced by the Nazi Party of the 1930s.) India, Brazil, the Philippines, England, France, Germany are all in a battle for the hearts and minds of their citizens. I started listening to a podcast called Day X which tells the story of the rise of white supremacism and nativism in Germany and how far-right radicals want to initiate a race war as a reason to shut the borders and expel or eliminate ‘others’. To me, the embrace of fascism seems connected, most specifically, to immigration and refugees from war, climate, genocide and dwindling resources.
The wealthier nations of the world have been the driving force behind practically all of those issues. We’ve been bombing, mining, denuding, clear-cutting and intervening in the politics of these countries for well over a century, and so we, the wealthy nations of the world, are predominantly to blame for the lousy livability index in many parts of the globe. The invisible hand of capitalism is at play.
I was thinking the other day that as much as I like to deride the idea of shuttling billionaires, along with a few—very fortunate—‘everyday’ people to the moon, exposing more and more of us to a finite view of our planet could turn out to be what’s needed to turn the tide toward purpose-driven globalism. We need more of us to be thinking of ourselves as Earthlings and not Americans, Germans or Ethiopians. Or, at least, both Earthling and American. Viewing our little blue pearl in the vastness of outer space may very well provide the impetus (that no amount of scientific data could provide) from those who hold all of the pursestrings.
This week we received the slightest glimmer of what might be possible at the shareholder convention at Exxon/Mobil if people in power were forced to give a shit. Or if some of the people in power actually gave a shit.
Until then we need to brace ourselves for all of those chickens coming home to roost.
A few days have passed since the anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre and the complete destruction of “Black Wall Street”. It feels relevant to what I wrote about above because it is an example of how violence and destruction alter the course of history. This article and 3-D rendering of what transpired all those years ago from the New York Times is eye-opening. Hope you don’t hit a paywall.
Also, America is a Gun, a poem by Brian Bilston:
England is a cup of tea.
France, a wheel of ripened brie.
Greece, a short, squat olive tree.
America is a gun.Brazil is a football on the sand.
Argentina, Maradona’s hand.
Germany, an oompah band.
America is a gun.Holland is a wooden shoe.
Hungary, a goulash stew.
Australia, a kangaroo.
America is a gun.Japan is a thermal spring.
Scotland is a highland fling.
Oh, better to be anything
than America as a gun.
And this video of Michael Murphy’s installations will definitely elicit a “Wow!”