Even though I’m comfortably indoors, I’m thinking about those who aren’t and are suffering in this weather.
It’s an (expensive) privilege to live with aircon, and I’m grateful. But I also think about everyone who doesn’t have access, including and especially homeless people living outside. It pains me to enjoy what should be basic guaranteed human rights when I know others are being denied those same things and suffering.
It’s still 80°F an hour from midnight. It was a high of 92° today, with the heat index making it feel like 101°, according to my weather app this afternoon.
People who have to work out during the day in these 90-100°F plus temps – especially with the added corn sweat humidity and wildfire smoke particulates – are on my mind too.
Every summer that passes will be cooler than the next for the next few decades, despite already setting heat records for the last several years, because the Capitalocene Era has made that irreversible impact on our planet’s ecosystem.
The heat is only going to get worse, and it’s turned some parts of the planet that have been survivable into hostile places that cannot support the life forms that have long lived there. This includes, but is not exclusive to, humans. Our climate crisis is impacting the entire interconnected web of life.
Get used to radical changes in our lifetimes. If we don’t force radical, rapid political and societal changes in the Western Capitalist nations, our lifetimes are likely to diminish in duration, unless you’re quite wealthy. Even then, it will involve risks.
The very wealthy own and control most everything, and the climate crisis is just one of the impacts of their avaricious rule.
So as your life quality deteriorates, along the lives of most (if not all) the people you know, realize that we’re at a point in history where we can organize to implement people’s democracy to replace the bourgeois “democracy” we live under. But we have to unlearn bourgeois ideology and be willing to admit where we are wrong, then fix it.
We must be willing to change our minds and our habits, or we’re not gonna make it. We must care more about life and one another than we do about either side of the bourgeois controlled political Duopoly in the US.
As you consider how to proceed, if you think the usual “contact your representatives,” “vote!” and other actions utilizing the systems designed by the very wealthy to retain their power are the solution, give yourself permission to think beyond those exercises. Start asking questions about the system we live under.
Can a system that tolerates Fascism on any level truly be a democracy?
If the Democrat party can lose elections to Fascists, is that a democracy?
If elected officials can do so little for the majority of their constituents in terms of improved material conditions, while executives and politicians continue to exponentially increase their wealth hoards, is that democracy?
If the Democrat party always runs into systemic obstacles (eg Senate Parliamentarian, “Now Is Not The Time,” etc) they cannot overcome when they hold power, resulting in an inability to pass promised progressive legislation, is that democracy?
If Democrat candidates make campaign promises regarding policy and actions they’ll take if elected, but after taking office, they don’t or can’t, is that democracy?
If Democrat candidates who promise to undo Fascist damage to our way of life with better policy can’t or won’t implement it after elections – is that democracy?
Is it democracy when there are no systemic safeguards to prevent Fascists from being elected and then taking/holding office?
Is it democracy to materially support and even participate in the genocide of Indigenous peoples all over the world?
Is it democracy to render our planet uninhabitable?
If this is democracy, who are its benefactors? Cui bono? Who is truly benefitting from this bourgeois democracy such that they’re willing to use Fascism to guard it from being replaced with something that guarantees the basic material needs of all humans?
Does the only nation in history to use nuclear bombs as an offensive weapon and show of force – which it did on civilians – have the authority to determine what democracy is?
There are many more examples from US history that can replace the bombings of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the question above, and I encourage you to do that after you’ve read some of the books from this list.
Stop accepting the status quo of the US and capitalism as the only possibilities for living. Our planet and all its inhabitants need us to grow beyond the limited framework of perceiving and understanding the world that we’ve been conditioned into believing is the only acceptable way of life by the owners/rulers of the system that’s brought us to the precipice of extinction.