Claiming to be the leader of progressive change in an area in which progress is actively being stymied, truly the American way. Today’s (as well as many other days’) focus is on the climate cliff and immigration, and the Trump administration’s false insistence that the United States leads the way on environmental leadership. Laughable when juxtaposed with this country’s actual policies as of late. Especially laughable given how short a time frame we may have left to battle back the damage already wrought, with the UN recently predicting only eleven years left to fight climate change before we see its irreparable damage on the world and the increasingly difficult struggle for survival of future generations that will follow.
The entire endeavor feels futile, as the powerful hold so much more power than the rest of us, backed by astronomical wealth and a horrific display of weaponry that could easily stomp down any real push for change, any effort to make the future appear hopeful for once. How does a populace defend itself against a regime that relentlessly touts lies as the truth against all evidence to the contrary, with the populace fully aware that those truths are lies—and the regime itself almost certainly aware as well? This is old news, a story told again and again since 2016 to the point of annoyance and exhaustion at hearing about the myriad untruths falling to our debilitated ears; but with masses of lives on the line, with the clock ticking rapidly down—to ignore the direction our institutions are pushing us because of the way they handle their business would be improvident and naive. It guarantees a worse, doomed world.
The immediacy of climate change will surely overshadow the endless war propagated by the United States—always on foreign soil, out of sight and out of mind. Our effects on the Earth’s peoples, however, will not be so discerning. While other nations will be ravaged more thoroughly, those same effects will find their way upon our doorstep, through the same door closed shut to outsiders seeking refuge from the chaos our leaders have always created elsewhere. Only this time the chaos, too, will be inside the home, revealing the entire franchise and its labyrinthine rules and privileges to be a sham of unparalleled depravity. We’re seeing firsthand what those policies look like, what with the images of the vice president staring caged men in the face without a pang of guilt, or Trump’s crackdown of immigrant families that has begun this weekend. The trickling bits of information and images we are witnessing will only grow more exacerbated with time as climate change ravages societies—more people denied the right to asylum, of being turned away or held in captivity like zoo animals simply for being born outside of the oh-so-revered territorial lines of This Great Nation, a nation whose effects on the outside world cause a significant number of people to migrate here in the first place. The irony of the allure of a better American life drawing people to this country only to have the worst horrors enacted on them because of their hope is not lost on me.
You could count on one hand the number of federal congresspeople treating climate change as the inevitable and ruthless reckoning it will soon become. The failure of our political leaders to wield their power in a manner suitable to the common citizen—and instead putting it towards closing our borders and hoarding unfathomable opulence for themselves before we realize the rug has long been pulled from under us—will be a stain on both the ruling class for its inaction as well as the rest of us beneath them for not fighting back with the proper fortitude or appreciation of the stakes at hand. It feels as though the future has never felt more bleak and uncertain; but in that uncertainty lies the possibility of vast change in a dignified direction, and change that must come soon.
A truth from the late Ursula Le Guin, stated with grace in her masterful The Dispossessed: “Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.”
Simply a starting point from which the real work can be done.
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