She asked me to clean out the spiders.
My no wasn’t even words it was a force.
I try to assume most people haven’t actually taken the time to meet a spider.
Like how we do with each other except at a mass and verticality ratio that’s off the charts.
It’s one thing to have a fear, it’s another entirely to have rationality and fear as copilots.
The Greeks, Romans, and dozens of other civilizations
have done great work on objective good.
Here in America, we don’t understand our fears in the drivers seat, otherwise a lot of conflicts would have been deterred.
Voter turnout will be….?
It seems like the media don’t want none of us to vote.
Let’s be mean to each other some more.
I bet your marriage is pretty great.
Where do we go from here?
One of my favorite things about big elections is revelation of the limits of human predictive power. One of my least favorite things is being confronted with how policy and power are decided by tribalism vice thoughtful policy debate—but that’s neither here nor there.
Take for example, the Supreme Court nomination. Headlines broke with the best/worst possible outcome predicted as fact by both sides. In the following news stories, it becomes more apparent that we never actually quite know how a Justice is going to reason on any given issue, but for the games of power, the breaking headline is all that matters and so it comes to influence almost all of us. We are all subtly encouraged to be decisive and opinionated in our prediction, however full of fallacy and unaware of relevant information we are. The breaking headline defines the narrative and scope. Polarization continues to remain a viable measure in the games of power.
Because we have become so conditioned to respond to the breaking headlines over the last 70 years or so, we have collectively chosen a path of stunted reasoning and public discussion that has exponentially accelerated with the rise of social media. There are many contributing factors, but causation is not the subject of this piece.
Rather, what is the subject is the narrative and scope of the American experiment.
It is called the American Dream for good reason: faith in the fabric of this complex society (contributing ‘ethnic’ histories; political, economic, education/scientific, religious and other institutions; as well as the more ‘feminine’ threads that comprise how we go about our daily lives and the commonplaces we have faith in such as neighborliness and work ethic)—faith in the fabric of this complex society reinforces the likelihood of outcomes. One could perhaps argue that part of the retrenchment against equality for blacks is a sub/semi conscious awareness of the fragility of the fabric in undergoing such a seismic shift (and, despite the best efforts of many courageous and amazing people, it remains a seismic-level undertaking as we have all been forced to observe this year).
Again, sidestepping digression to return to the point at hand.
The breaking headlines of climate change. And the breaking headlines of the end of an empire.
Both terms, climate change and end of an empire, connote such a complexity of facts, memories, experiences, beliefs and values, that it becomes very challenging to figure out if each reader and I are on the same page. Especially if at this point in the article you’ve come to some conclusions about whether I am Team Blue or Team Red.
I think we all have ideas about when and how America might die. But the complexity of the data sets is orders of magnitude higher than predicting elections, Justice rulings, or the causes of inequality. So, our predictions are shouts in the wind.
I think an awareness of that is part of what contributes to the rejection of climate change predictions (as well as the curation of breaking headlines by various entities behind the scenes of the headline-dominance fights of Team Red vice Team Blue, both purposeful and not). And, science has so often looked foolish in its predictions (or advocates of scientific advance have).
However, at this point, 2020, so many incontrovertible facts have landed on the world stage, that I fail to understand rejection of climate change other than as an unwillingness to be uncomfortable that is all too human.
And because we have put it off for so long, the degree to which we would now have to be uncomfortable—to work together collectively in meaningful ways, to make sacrifices and changes to our daily lived experience—is staggering and a little bit scary.
And we are all so, so used to just waiting for our Team to regain power and wait for them to ‘do the right thing’.
So, if climate change models predict serious, perhaps irreversible change after a 2 degree increase in global temperature, and that the window for collective action is 7 years, then what are we waiting for?
I think it is because the society is so large, and we have so many demands upon us, and we are so used to the comforts of our lives, and the problem is so big, and we do still have so much faith in the American Fabric, that we don’t even know where to begin.
It is my goal for 2020 to find a beginning, find a plan. Sort through the overwhelming amount of information and figure out what a useful prediction for what my world will look like in 2027 that I can take meaningful action right now to optimize what my social fabric will look like. Whose with me?
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised