Two fundamental truths about America were reaffirmed last night.
One, millions of Americans will crawl across broken glass if necessary to cast a vote against a woman, especially if she’s a woman who openly vows to protect women’s equal rights. And even if she takes great care not to even mention that she’s a woman.
Some of those cut-up knees belong to women. (Another truism about this country—institutional white supremacy will always have its help-meets, because proximity to power feels safe, even though the approval they seek will never, ever come, no matter how much they debase themselves for it.)
Two, a country built on a system of the kind of psychopathic individualism that encourages the harvesting of American resources to amass wealth and prosperity while sacrificing nothing and giving nothing will not hold.
Add to this a corrupted religious tradition that, somewhat remarkably, has transformed into the antithesis of what its founder taught: self-professed “Christians” comfortably living in homes with five-car garages (because god feels they deserve it), who jump on Reddit to bray insults at immigrants and low-income workers (because if god wanted them to have a five-car garage, then they would have one—clearly they did something wrong), and who have convinced themselves (and the media) that they are the real victims.
Here’s the deal. We are social animals that, like any fellow creature on this planet that evolved to live in groups, depend entirely on one another to survive.
We depend on the expertise and training of medical professionals to help us manage disease and injury.
We depend on teachers to educate us and our children.
We depend on those who harvest the food we buy to eat, on the brilliant minds that devised technology allowing us to connect with the rest of the world or to capture fleeting moments of beauty—a sunrise, the Northern Lights, a baby hippopotamus— that we, being the gregarious animals we are, want to preserve for others to see.
Why do we want them to see? What is that drive we feel to share with others, whether familiars or strangers?
Because community is encoded in our DNA as deeply as our love of—and trust in—the setting sun. Because without community, our ancient and largely unconscious memory tells us, we die.
So we seek to make and reinforce connections, whether that’s in the form of sharing a meal, helping a neighbor build a barn, visiting a friend’s sick parent in the hospital, or taking a cell phone video of a shooting star and posting it on TikTok. We are supposed to care about one another.
And I believe we still do, but it’s time we pointed out the obvious, which is that what we’ve been experiencing together since 2016 is the inevitable and successful endpoint of a campaign waged by a group of extremely wealthy members of the ruling class to bring us to this moment of communal moral bankruptcy.
They managed to convince millions of Americans that compassion is a liability, not a survival strategy. That what you want, what you can get for yourself and your family, is the only thing that matters, and requests for sacrifice, understanding, or even listening are impositions. They got us to believe that the asking itself is political.
Since the days of Reconstruction, when working class whites and working class blacks, for a fleeting moment, understood they were natural allies in this capitalistic society, the ruling class and wealthy sought to divide those whose interests aligned.
The nightmare scenario, of course, was blacks and whites working together to demand fair wages and safe working conditions. So they told the poor whites they were superior to all blacks, and made one disenfranchised group feel that they had value if another group had none. It was a brilliant chess move, and as of this moment, it has never been answered.
Here we are, all these years later, and we have billionaires stoking racial hatred, purchasing justices, and buying not only influence but entire delegations of U.S. representatives, inviting dictators to meddle in our democratic processes, manipulating media, elevating the worst of us on media they own, and silencing those who would speak truth to power, and for what? Because they want one more dollar.
Make no mistake. They will burn this planet to cinders before they will stop trying to squeeze every last resource from it—and from them.
In a book I ended up not having the stomach to finish writing, set in a climate-impacted near-future that no longer seems speculative, a pharmaceutical company develops a drug to treat solastalgia.
Called Climafeel, it promises to take way the worries and anxieties caused by runaway climate change.
The reason the drug is rushed to market is because climate change has had a devastating impact on the labor force. “After factoring in comorbidities resulting in increased PTO,” a company document reads, “suicide-related loss of institutional knowledge, and the associated onboarding costs of new hires, solastalgia is costing U.S. businesses $400 billion a year.”
I made this up for a novel, but it’s perhaps the least imaginative thing I’ve ever written. Because it’s true. They don’t care about us, which is why they’ve tried to make us stop caring about one another.
Last night demonstrated that they’ve succeeded in this endeavor to a degree I did not think possible. Not only have they managed to engineer millions of people to hate other members of their community, including fellow community members like doctors who provide them lifesaving medical care and immigrants who ensure their access to fresh food, they’ve also installed in them a self-destruction code.
Convincing Floridians to vote to dissolve FEMA and NOAA is proof is an astonishing achievement.
The marketing tagline of Climafeel, the drug I invented that makes people feel better about climate change and want to go back to work is: Have you ever wondered what it might feel like not to care? But the drug is real, and millions are addicted.
The ceremony of innocence, Yeats tells us in “The Second Coming,” is drowned. The rough beast that “slouches toward Bethlehem” foretells the violence of transition into a new age.
Is there enough time, and is there enough courage among those of us who are trying to resuscitate our conviction that this country is worth fighting for, to ignore the chattering birds reeling around the ruins and rid ourselves of the false falconers who’ve brought us to the brink?
Is there enough time to do all this, and call back the falcon, too?
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