The climate crisis is worsening, so we debate whether to pass a carbon tax or just keep recycling. Should we go with wind power, solar, or thermal? Maybe we should go back to building big dams. Nah, let’s just call fossil fuels like natural gas “transitional,” and discuss the possibilities of “clean coal.”
Overt racism and misogyny are reenergized. Let’s make a mixed-race woman Vice-President. We’ll appoint an African American woman to the Supreme Court. Nah, how about we just stop our kids from reading or talking about these things. Also, let’s make sure they don’t see any of it on television.
Our LGBTQ+ youth are committing suicide at an alarming rate. Let’s set up a hotline. Or we could just make being trans illegal.
The country’s wealth gap is widening and the middle class is disappearing. Let’s raise the minimum wage inadequately, let’s increase taxes tentatively on the super wealthy. Or let’s just promote exciting stories about billionaires doing exciting things with their obscene wealth; like trying to end a disease somewhere or grow food somewhere else. Or something really exciting, like building their own space ships and making even more money charging other super-rich people millions of dollars for space-tourism adventures.
Pick a problem. Any problem. Now slip it back into the deck. And is this your card? The one that says, “All right. Let’s . . . do . . . well . . . something. Surely there’s a law we can pass, someone we can give an honor to, or a day or a week or a month we can spend talking about good stuff peripherally related to it. Is there someone we can bomb?” Or is it this one, with the picture of the ostrich looking for a hole to put its head in? And the holes are labelled things like “ban it,” “oppress it,” “deny its existence,” and “call it socialist.”
We are most certainly a more polarized citizenry than I can remember our being in my lifetime. Far too many of us are living at the extremes, and the things we want to do, believe we need to do, defy compromise. But the fundamental problem isn’t our divided society, it’s something we all seem to agree on, though we may not realize it.
We prefer actions over solutions.
Solutions are hard. Actions are easy. Solutions can be expensive. Actions can be cheap. Solutions take time and patience. Actions are quick and we can say we did something right away. Solutions require all, or nearly all, of us to be part of them. Actions can be done by those few people we elect to do those things so we don’t have to worry about them, or by those who want to do them.
So, we eschew solutions to our problems in favor of an action here, an action there; like taking one lick every few years at a lollipop, thinking we’ll eventually get to the special treat in the center. Or our kids will. Or their kids. As long as we, and they, can keep licking.
And we think it’s a virtue. Compromise and patience are always good things. Better to do something than nothing. And there is some truth in that. Each extreme sees their actions as doing something good. And the things we may do aren’t necessarily bad things to do. Some of them make a real positive difference in people’s lives. Maybe other people’s lives, or maybe just our own. But they make a difference.
Allow me to interject here, that I am a progressive, and I have some very strong opinions about which actions are doing good and which are causing unconscionable harm. I have debated these things elsewhere, and will continue to do so. For the moment, though, I want to focus specifically on solutions versus actions.
Within the political divisions currently playing out, the differences in our actions have, themselves, become destructive, even deadly. Now, more than ever, we need a larger plan. We need to be working more comprehensively on solutions, not just chipping away at our problems on one side and trying to bury them on the other.
I have said before that there are no isolated incidents. There are no problems that exist without context. Like our natural world, our personal, social, economic, and political realities are an ecological system in which everything is connected. The wealth gap, for example, is not simply a problem of our capitalist economic system. It exists within a context of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, sexual and gender bias, religious intolerance and self-righteousness, white male privilege, and the destructive exploitation of the natural environment. That isn’t even close to an exhaustive list.
And the effects are reciprocal. Racism isn’t a separate problem that can be solved separately. The climate crisis cannot be resolved in isolation from the economic imbalances or racial prejudices. You see abortion as a problem? You cannot ignore poverty, ignorance, racism, or misogyny.
This is what has been behind ideas such as the Green New Deal. This is what we can learn from critical race theory (the real thing, not the bastardized versions being promoted on the right). This is why we need science and the arts and history and philosophy, all of these, as part of the discussion.
We do need to prioritize, to triage, of course. We do need to see that this will take time. But we need to start seeing everything we do as part of a larger plan, a comprehensive solution that looks beyond the current actions and imagines a better world. And our actions need to be larger, bolder. We need persistence as well as patience. We need courage to tackle the hard work, commitment to spend the necessary resources, the wisdom to see that the solutions will never be just about us, about what we will gain individually or group by group. Patience isn’t license to procrastinate, it’s being willing to take the time to do it right. Compromise, properly employed, isn’t about finding some imaginary middle between two extremes, it’s about being willing to see that there can be no solution that will not require something of us that we do not yet want to give.
It is way past time to stop taking actions, and start finding solutions.
Commentary, COVID-19, Liberal, Politics, Progressive
WAITING FOR THE PUNCHLINE – AND WANTING TO PUNCH SOMEONE
In Politics on March 29, 2020 at 11:01 amWe have relied, for the past several years, on the network and cable comedy shows to help keep us sane in these difficult times. Often, it seems as though John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, and the other late-night hosts have been a more reliable source of the truth about what’s happening in this country and the world than the main stream media.
And yet.
And yet.
Now that all the shows have been put online without audiences, I have been unable to bring myself to watch them. I see the Daily Show videos, the Colbert monologues, and I can’t bring myself to watch them.
I can no longer allow myself the luxury of relying on comedy to get me through this. It is too great a privilege.
I am a 72-year-old white male, retired, living at home with my wife, who is also retired. I can afford to sit at home and laugh through my anger and fear. I’m not being deprived of a wage that was already less than a living wage. I don’t have to figure out what to do about my children. I have books and television and radio and my cell phone and my computer. I can be isolated and not alone. I don’t have to go to work every day and risk my life. I don’t have to strip off my clothes before entering my house, then deny myself and my family even the simplest intimacies.
I am fortunate and I am privileged.
I even have reason to believe that even if I got sick I could afford testing and treatment.
My wife and I are social-distancing, self-isolating. We go out only to pick up a few things at the grocery store, where she goes in because she is younger than I and all the advisories say that I am more at risk if one of us gets infected. She is also required by family obligations to go out more than I. Of course, we must assume that if one of us were to become infected it is most likely that we both would.
Still, we follow the protocols. We clean everything that comes into the house. We leave groceries on the porch until we can sanitize the packages as best we can. We wipe down the mail. When we go for a walk outside with a friend, we stay 6 feet apart. We wash our hands frequently. We have reviewed all the guidelines. We live in a rural community where the virus has not yet been shown to be present, but assume it is only a matter of time.
We do this not simply because the government or the CDC or WHO or anyone else has required it, but because we want to be as safe as possible and we want others to be safe as well.
We worry about our sisters and brothers, our children and grandchildren, our friends and neighbors, many of whom may be more at risk than we are.
We live in ignorance of the facts. Like everyone else, we cannot really know the extent or location of the virus because testing is not being done as broadly or efficiently as it should. Was that dry cough a reaction to my blood pressure medicine or was I sick? Is there always a fever, or could I have been carrying the virus asymptomatically? Were our grandchildren infected before the schools were closed; before their soccer practice or games were suspended?
Will the measures now, finally, being taken mean that this crisis will be behind us by summer or still with us at Christmas?
How long? How much?
And that is why I cannot look right now at the comedy.
I’m too angry.
I can no longer laugh at Donald Trump. I can no longer see his daily displays of ignorance, pettiness, self-aggrandizement, lack of empathy or compassion, attacks on anyone and everyone who dares to suggest he might be wrong, might do better, might have some genuine responsibility to something other than himself, and not feel frightened for the future of our country, our democracy, our way of life.
I am way past the time to allow myself to believe that black humor, trench humor, can help us. These are dangerous times; not just because of the coronavirus, but because we are witnessing the willingness of the people in power openly and wantonly to destroy the Constitution in order to enrich themselves with both money and political power.
While we sit in our houses or suffer through our lives in the shadow of COVID-19, Our government is conspiring to stack the federal courts with unqualified, ideologically driven judges. They are arranging to give away hundreds of billions of taxpayer money to multi-billion-dollar corporations. They are stealing land and stealing the vote from the First Nations. They are carrying out petty vendettas. And they are dragging their feet on addressing the COVID-19 crisis because of unrelated, unimportant, fringe beliefs and issues. They are spinning lies and conspiracy theories and distortions rather than dealing directly with the very real issues of life and death.
And I want to go into the streets. I want all of us, by the millions to be in the streets. And we can’t be. The coronavirus has not just made us into hermits, it has robbed us of our most important power as citizens.
I expect I will get my sense of humor back. I do see some hopeful signs, good things swirling around in the chaos with everything else. I am, however, afraid that November may be too late for far too many of us. What will be left by then? And will we be able to come back from this?
We must stay engaged. We must stay afraid. We must stay angry. We must stay safe. When the doctors and the health experts tell us it is safe enough, we must go into the streets. And when the Fall does come around, we must take our fear and our anger to the voting booth in numbers that will make it loud and clear that we are not fooling around any longer.
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