Desperate but not Serious
We know bad things are coming to even those of us insulated by privilege. What sort of emotional stance should we be taking?
There’s an old Vienesse joke that briefly goes like this: “In Berlin, the situation is serious, but not desperate. In Vienna, the situation is desperate but not serious.”
There seems to be disagreement over whether we have already pushed the climate too far, or whether we are merely on a politically inexorable course towards this point (in reality, we face multiple interacting critical failure points such that predicting which one will actually go is impossible). The general agreement, to put it broadly, is that things are going to get bad, maybe existential, and that we aren’t collectively moving towards stopping this process, or even ameliorating it in any serious way.
So, it’s bad, and the majority of my observant friends and family seem to have come to some level of acceptance of this. The question then becomes, “well, so how should I respond to this?”
This is intended to be a short missive, so I won’t go into any detail about the grieving and whether choosing optimism or hope is useful or not. What I want to suggest is a two-fold strategy that covers the emotional and the practical.
None of us are getting out alive, but then, we always knew that. The rallying cry seems to always be “Yes, but not yet!”. In the same way that we accept that we will die, and still dance, and play, we accept that we are on a tide far beyond any one of us to direct, and commit to living as fully as we can on this little raft of ours.
“We” may not exist, in any real sense (depending on how you see the world). But suffering does exist, and we should work to reduce it where we can. The ship may be sinking, but there are children to comfort, lovers to reunite.
From this perspective springs my call to action: now is not the time to sell one’s belongings and hike out of the city, or build a zombie-proof fortress in a mall. Now is the time to meet your neighbours, to build up collective assets and power and trust. Join the community garden, your union, find your people and work on stuff together..
While we continue to live, there will be work to do and people to help. Let’s feel our feelings and keep moving forward, appreciating our moments of joy with gratitude.