like holy shit the bourgeoisie are trying to kill us all actively en masse within our lifetimes and all movement against it feels like it has died come the 20s. Every time it gets brought up it feels like people are either revelling in it, are denying it, are too tired to care, say “someone’s going to fix it so there’s no point in worrying," or get angry asking “well what do you want me to do about it I can’t fix it” or something. It feels like we’re in a moment where we have just abandoned science all together in the decaying west, so the plan is almost like to keep attacking the biosphere out of spite for everyone around us.
It feels Lovecraftian, I can’t think about it because every time I do it paralyzes me in awe of the urgency and scope of what has to be done. Do I just stop thinking about it? I guess the answer is to keep organizing but I’m scared that we don’t have enough time at this rate to address it before it gets catastrophic and has irreversible effects
At some point recently I realized I had kind of forgotten about it. There is just an absolute deluge of ongoing and increasing threats that demand immediate attention that it can be hard to remember the thing that, while super urgent, has distant consequences. That thought made me really depressed because I realized that not only have we made little progress on fixing this existential threat to humanity, but in some ways we’re getting further from being able to fix it. Fascism and surveillance capitalism are tightening the noose around effective political organizing and improvements to technology like AI are only going to make that worse on top of it’s impact on climate and the environment.
I keep having this irrational thought pop up in my head that’s something along the lines of “surely… they won’t keep making this worse right? There has to be some limit on just how cruel the people in power can get… right?” and then I snap myself back to reality and remember all they’ve done and continue to do and realize that isn’t going to happen. Over my life I’ve watched as things have just steadily gotten worse. There were glimmers of hope when Obama got elected, but seeing him continue most of the bad stuff was a real shock to my worldview. I thought that maybe things were going in the right direction with Bernie’s campaigns, but then that was crushed and now we have more brazen fascists in power.
I was recently thinking about just moving to a communist country like China or Vietnam, but aside from the logistical challenges involved in that, but even there the US will still manage to fuck me over with climate change so…
At this point, the fight for our freedom is the same as the fight for stopping climate change. The rich and powerful are never going to stop driving us towards that cliff, so we need to do something about them first. I just wish I knew what that even was.
If there was a way to not only starve the beast, but consume it from within its belly, while being impossible to rip out without making it bleed out further, would you want to take that opportunity, even if it meant leaving a lot of comforts and standards behind?