This is a child’s letter provided by Extinction Rebellion Purbeck (UK)
@XRPurbeckHere’s a copy of Eli’s (aged 11) speech from our #ClimateEmergency event on Monday’s #WorldOvershootDay
“I feel that the people in charge that have the power to make a difference aren’t doing so”
Eli
“I don’t want to be frightened of my future”
This is from a Twitter thread by
Elizabeth Sawin@bethsawinMother, systems thinker, committed to climate solutions that prioritize equity, health, and well being.
TEDx talk: (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prF8trTallQ) youtube.com/watch?v=prF8tr… Hartland, VT, USA climateinteractive.org
I think it’s worth reprinting for all the ‘bootstrap’ types that believe that they can ride anything out alone.
Thread follows:
Those of us (including me) raised in cultures that prioritize individualism, are poorly prepared for the #ClimateCrisis I think. When I feel demoralized or paralyzed, I root around in my mind, and often what I find underneath is one or another attitude of individualism.
Climate Individualism – focus on your own carbon footprint (which you can never drive low enough in a society awash in cheap fossil fuels)
Climate Collectivism – apply pressure so that incentives and infrastructure investments help lower everyone’s footprint
Individualism – look for ways to manage climate fear/grief/anger on your own
Climate Collectivism – see yourself as one sensing element amongst many and realize that vulnerability and sharing of your struggles strengthens others.
Climate Individualism – feel small and powerless because of the limits to your time, resources, and skills
Climate Collectivism – celebrate all the others, doing things you could never do, and focus on doing your small part with excellence and determination
Climate Individualism – if a full solution doesn’t seem possible in your lifetime then nothing feels worth trying
Climate Collectivism – your lifetime bridges centuries of harm that set the stage for climate change and centuries of healing that need to start now. Just be a bridge
Anyway, don’t take my word for it, test it out for yourself. The next time you feel overwhelmed or despairing about climate change are you thinking/feeling/acting out a pattern from a highly individualistic culture? If you shift the pattern, what changes?
Climate Individualism keeps us small and weak, and holds the status quo and vested interests in place. Watch out for it. And when it shows up, as it does for me in times of stress or exhaustion, see it, name it, and send it on its way.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.
From Wikipedia:
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers – 123 women and 23 men – who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling or jumping to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Italian and Jewish immigrant women aged 14 to 23; of the victims whose ages are known, the oldest victim was 43-year-old Providenza Panno, and the youngest were 14-year-olds Kate Leone and Rosaria “Sara” Maltese.
The factory was located on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the Asch Building, at 23–29 Washington Place in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. The 1901 building still stands today and is known as the Brown Building. It is part of and owned by New York University.
The last time I was in New York, I went to see that building to pay my respects to those who died. I had first read about this tragedy in a book on disasters my mother had gotten me as a present when I was about 12. It included some seriously grisly photos I won’t get into here.
No one knows exactly how the fire started but the doors were locked on the workers so they wouldn’t ‘steal’ from the owners and in any case, the only opened inwards. The fire escapes and elevators were flimsy and many people died trying to get out that way. The hallways to get there were only 33 inches wide. The fire hoses didn’t work.
Because the ‘shirtwaist,’ a blouse-y suit popularized by the Gibson Girl of that day, was made of light cotton, the fabric on the 10th floor lit up like dried kindling. In just minutes, the only way out was out the windows. And since New York City fire ladders only reached to the 7th floor, jumping meant death.
Fireman tried catching the women in canvas, but from that height, most hit the sidewalk and died. Some crashed through the sidewalk into the basement below.
As countless New Yorkers watched in horror, the women and some of the men appeared at the windows, hung on against the flames for as long as they could, and then jumped.
What does that have to do with this blog?
Legend persists to this day of the figure of a man, dressed in tailored clothes, like a supervisor, who appeared at the window. He took the panicked women by the hand, kissed some of them, and then let them go as they jumped. It seemed to those watching below that the man’s demeanor had a calming, almost tranquilizing effect on the women and helped them take the step none of them wanted to.
Imagine the women at the Triangle Fire as the people I know and people who read this blog, listen to the podcast and watch the You Tube channel. When their future become uncertain, they will need someone to help them over the pain of accepting their fate. I want to be that guy on the 10th floor, real or not.
No matter how it goes down and when, it won’t be pleasant. We all need to try and be the ‘hospice worker’ of the person on an Earth that is in hospice, helping people cope as best they can.
And that is what this is all about.
Oh, by the way, in the aftermath of the fire, the factory owners were tried for murder. . .and acquitted. Capitalism must be protected, you know. But a shocked press and public demanded and got, safer, more human working conditions for garment workers. It sped the growth of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) whom you may have heard of.
Bringing the heat:
Record heat in Europe
The unseen damage of that heat that will reveal itself later
July will be the hottest in history as records continue to fall
Trump administration deletes climate science from .gov sites
Continuing atrocity in the Amazon
Comment from Tim Flannery to the BBC – climate deniers are threatening our children. Discussion on how hard it is for me to hold back
Future of Extinction Rebellion in the US
Climate Anxiety and how we may cope.
https://last-dance.simplecast.com/episodes/last-dance-02-19-07-28
Podcast for those who would rather listen to the short form
Also available on Apple, Google and Spotify podcasts
From a blog entry from yesterday
The loss of human life will probably reveal itself next week, when the weekly mortality figures are released. The loss of human potential will take a bit longer. Young children exposed to extreme heat suffer subtle brain damage that can be measured through reduced personal income at age 30. Children playing at a summer camp had to be hospitalized, because their brains reached temperatures of up to 42 degree. Compared to us humans, many other lifeforms are even more sensitive. Male insects exposed to extreme heat have their fertility damaged and insects exposed to consecutive heatwaves are practically sterilized. This is our second heatwave in a short period. Insects around the country have been decimated, by two consecutive droughts during the summer and now an extreme heatwave that is unprecedented in the historical record.
https://www.rintrah.nl/about/
This is heady stuff, well written with care and concern. Yesterday’s record temps in Holland, as the author writes about, are not merely hot days to be endured, but have serious consequences in the long term that are not readily apparent.
What struck me the most about the author wrote was the need to understand that the beauty we see today as well as the animals and the insects, are not guaranteed to be there tomorrow so we must pay attention. We must, in order to appreciate what is leaving us, take mental pictures of what exists now. In other words – notice life around you.
The post ends on a wistful note, one that resonates with me. I know the insects are going away – so many less that what I remember from my youth. I thought it would be wonderful to be outside without the bugs. Now it just seems weird.
But it reminded me of one of my favorite songs that has been on my mind from time to time and always leaves me feeling sad.
Before the breathin’ air is gone
Three Dog Night
Before the sun is just a bright spot in the night-time
Out where the rivers like to run
I stand alone and take back somethin’ worth rememberin’
As a person with mental illness, you would be correct to wonder how I respond to all the increasingly dire climate news. After all, although you wouldn’t know this, I’ve my periods of suicidal ideation.
I’ve found that I no longer have any periods of suicidal ideation.
How can that be?
To understand why that is, remember that each person with a mental illness will see and react to things just a little bit differently that someone who even has the same diagnosis.
Also remember, that the external motivations of those of us so afflicted work in unexpected ways.
I no longer have suicidal ideation since the endgame of abrupt climate change has placed an event horizon on my life anyway. I merely have to give in to every sybaritic pleasure I’ve ever wanted to indulge in and wait for the inevitable.
Having a 10-year (or less) event horizon on societal collapse, renders quite a bit of the things that deeply worry me, well, moot. In a way it’s like the tagline of my all-time favorite movie ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.
The fuel that runs my conditions and all their attendant symptoms are the things ordinary people worry about all the time but get blown out of proportion by myself. Things like: worrying about keeping my job, whether everyone can be made to like me, will I ever find my purpose in life, am I going to die of cancer, whether I have enough to retire on, etc. etc.
The likelihood of social collapse due to global climate change has freed me from all that.
The one thing I have learned is not to worry about things that are out of my control and climate change and societal collapse are WAY out of my control.
And to add something else that must be admitted: the medications I am on make it very easy for me not to worry about things I can’t control. The downside is that I’m unable to experience joy.
It’s a necessary tradeoff, unfortunately. Me unmedicated is not good for myself or anyone else.
I’ve spent a lifetime vainly trying to find a mission. Climate change and societal collapse has given me one: you’re reading it. And my podcast as well.
Why do I do it?
Because I can and do feel terrible for the people mentioned in this article because I used to worry as they do – to the point of being all but dysfunctional. It’s not their fault – worrying about having your future cut short is very legitimate.
Being something of an empath, I don’t have to personally know the people in the article to image the pain they are in. Everything I do now is an attempt, in some small way, to help them.
I believe we must not lie about what is coming. My greatest fear, one I still possess, is being blindsided by bad news. Setting people up to be blindsided by the sudden realization that climate change and its attendant societal collapse was not a Socialist plot by evil scientists is going to hit people very hard.
Not that people shouldn’t protest or do what they can on a local level to help the earth, but we need to be realistic: for every tree we plant, Brazil cuts down 30 and the industrialized nations pump untold millions of cubic tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the threat of a giant methane threat looms. And with Trump and Johnson in charge of the US and the UK, things will just get worse.
Physically, most people can bear a surprising amount of pain and stress. Mentally, things are a different story nowadays. Western societies, especially the US, have given their people the expectations that each succeeding generation will have it better than the one before, technology will free us from our mundane existence and provide us with so many wonderful toys, and human progress is measured in an ever-increasing GDP which will one day make everyone rich.
The whole idea that everything in that preceding paragraph set us up for this disaster is something people are not handling well. They shouldn’t be expected to.
This is not license for people like me to run around pointing at people and screaming ‘you’re all gonna die and you deserve it you bastard Capitalists!’
Most people simply believed what they were told. And why would the government and corporations lie to us? In the absence of other competing information, what were people to think? Surely a climate Armageddon seems so far-fetched!
Although I consider myself an agnostic now, I was raised Catholic. In Catholic school, while my eyes glazed over during most classes, it seems that Catholic social teaching, derided as it was at the time by many of my classmates, stuck. And the whole ethos of Catholic social teaching can be summed up thusly: ‘we are made for service to care for all men.’
The masses of people are going to have a hard time imagining their hopes, dreams and aspirations being cut cruelly short. They deserve our care and sympathy, not derision. The denialists, well, OK, they deserve derision, but ordinary people need care.
I’m 56 years of age. It’s easy for me to say I’ve had a good run. But for my sons, for your children, for those embarking on their adult lives, for lives of those being born now, this is a monstrous thing.
Even if we can hold civilization together for 10 years or more, our children will remember these times of relative plenty as they live on a globe radically different than the one they knew just a scant decade ago.
What will we tell them? How will we prepare people for this? How do we ease the pain of knowing, of realizing? How can we nurse humankind into their fate?
There’s an oft-quoted line from the movie Braveheart: “Every man dies. Not every man really lives.”
And there’s another, just as important: “I’m so afraid. Give me the strength to die well.”
Regarding the first quote it is imperative that we assist people, not to stand in frozen terror, but to go out and live as they have never lived before; to try everything they’ve ever wanted to do; go everywhere they’ve wanted to go. If you feel called to devote the remainder of your life to the Earth through Extinction Rebellion or another group – great! Bucket lists must be honored. Enemies must be forgiven. We must reconcile ourselves to whatever spirituality we seek. For the love of all that’s holy – live with reckless abandon. The future truly is now.
As to the second one, if what I have suggested people do in the paragraph above is done well, then dying well, whenever and however it comes, will come with satisfaction of a life, perhaps shorted than we envisioned, but just as well lived as any longer.
When I was in Catholic elementary school, we had a nun who taught math to the junior high grades. In our intentions said at the beginning of class, she would make us all pray for a happy death.
As you can imagine, this was quite a shock to 13-year-olds. But as she explained it, the concept was very important. In her mind, when the time came, we should look with favor upon our lives as servants to God and God would look favorably upon us and, thus, we had nothing to fear from death but only the grand expectation of an eternal afterlife.
For those of us not Catholic or Christian, a ‘happy death’ can mean being reconciled to all that is good in your life, forgiving yourselves and others of transgressions, and having a minimum of regrets to how one has spent their time on Earth. Or it can mean whatever the bloody Hell you want it to mean.
I know one day that I will face the fear that my medication and psychology has buried. Until that time, I must do what I can to help people with the transition.
So, I dedicate this to all of healers of the Earth, of humanity, the people in the helping professions, all those who believe they are their brothers’ keeper. We all have work to do.
We’ll go walking out
— Jethro Tull
While others shout of war’s disaster
Oh, we won’t give in
Let’s go living in the past
Every now and then I get mugged by nostalgia.
What I mean by that is I get it into my head to look back through the Internet to places or people I knew some time ago. When it happens, I literally get transfixed and time loses all meaning. At the end of the spell, I’m usually quite depressed.
Lately, I’ve been getting more mugged than usual.
Today for instance, I romanticized a mall in which I spent a good portion of my youth. I was looking for photos of it back in the 70s and 80s. Instead I get pictures of the now abandoned Sears where my father used to work and where all my new clothes for school were purchased. A few old photos did crop up, a lot of memories were processed and at the end, I felt as shitty as I usual do after these episodes, castigating myself: why the Hell do I keep doing this?
I find, perhaps, like many people anxious or resigned about the future, that I am spending more of my time looking back and romanticizing the past because, well, it was better then in many ways. When we are young, there is hope for a better life and the world is spread out before you like a candy store. At 56, facing a very uncertain future, it’s at first, comforting, and then at last, agonizing to go back and emotionally re-live all of that.
My basement is a repository of much of the junk I’ve been hauling around since I was a child. There’s the usual yearbooks and school photos but also the signed football my dad got me in 1969, my employee name badge from my first job at McDonalds, the coins I started collecting in 1970, and all four student IDs from my high school years. Stuff like that.
Sometimes I just wander around the room and pick up an item and the memories flood back. I move on to another. And it dawns on me that I’m mourning a life that is past and grieving a future that will not be. But these things, they . . . comfort me in some strange way.
Of course, nostalgia is like an addictive drug, I know that. Regret is nostalgia’s alter ego and always travels along with it. The nostalgia is the high, the regret, mostly that I raced through my life without appreciating these times I would later mourn, is the crash.
I wonder, sometimes, when we get to the point where collapse occurs or nuclear war or some other kind of finis to the human condition, whether I will choose this room to die in? Why not, after all? It comes with a humidor, a fully stocked bar and the pieces of my life all neatly arranged around me. I might hope so.
I know many will say being lost in grieving both the past and the future keeps one from fighting for something better, for working against the tide. Perhaps I am too much of a doomer. I always have been because, up until now, every prediction I have made about human nature’s influence on events has come true, much to my dismay. And I believe we, as a species, are programmed to destroy ourselves. It is bad, perhaps, but it is what it is, and I have come to terms with it.
The best I can do is to help others live the best life they can with the time we all have left. To do this for me, I will, of course, need to venture out of my basement and take one big trip around.
Maybe I’ll see you out there. I will not be the one hang gliding, however.
Last Call 