covid-19 – Mid-Missouri John Brown Gun Club

2021

I know it’s fun to think of a bad year, like 2020, as special, unique and finite. I just watched “Death to 2020” and it was pretty darn funny. It would really be great if all the things that made a year bad would just magically end at midnight on December 31. However, we are all adults and we know that the difference between one year and the next is an arbitrary point, and that events and trends don’t really care what year it is.

I hope you’re ready to focus back on what’s going on in the world.

The Half-assed Coup

First off, the half-assed coup continues. It looked like Trump had gone to Florida for good, but on New Year’s Eve he flew back to DC, and fascist politicos are at least pretending that they’re going to really try to derail congressional approval of the electoral college vote. I’ve seen commentary from the political press saying that the situation is “shocking”. It isn’t. We could just let the people vote and then whoever won the vote would be the next President. The whole reason why we have an electoral college, and the whole reason why the electoral college vote has to be approved by Congress is specifically so the votes of the people can be ignored if political elites feel they should be.

I do think that Trump will ultimately be dethroned, but people — liberals in particular — absolutely do not appreciate how entirely possible it is for Trump Republicans to end American democracy.

COVID-19

COVID-19 will still be with us for a while, and although the vaccine development process was truly amazing, it may not have been fast enough — thanks to anti-mask conservatives and upper-class frequent flyers. There are now at least 2 variants in the world — thankfully, the current vaccines appear to work against both. If the protein key on any new variant of COVID-19 does not match the original version, that will mean an additional vaccine will have to be produced and distributed. The estimate for when COVID-19 will be under control globally is already at around 2023.

US Inequality

Inequality in the US remains dramatic — it is the highest among the G7 nations. It is closer to the levels found in what Trump calls “shithole countries” than what is found in whatever the opposite of that is.

None of the political class has yet to address a real solution to the economic distress happening in America — it was there before, but COVID made things a lot worse. They just keep sending out checks that will be paid for later by hiking up our taxes or cutting government services; they might even steal our Social Security to pay for it. A real solution would be for a national rent freeze to be accompanied by a national mortgage freeze, but for some reason, the banks are untouchable. The Biden tax plan is a nice idea (if it can make it into law) but it is still weaker than what is required. It seems pretty unlikely that they’d go after the real inequity problem — billionaire wealth. The upshot is that working class Americans are going to continue to struggle financially.

Climate

The climate-change-exacerbated disasters that we saw in 2020 are likely to be worse this year, and worse still the year after. A government controlled by the mega-rich donor class will not be capable of creating and enforcing laws that get us to negative emissions, which is what is required to save humanity.

Joe Biden

Joe Biden’s cognitive functioning is going to be problematic. At the very least, he’s going to be seen as a joke, much like Trump was. At the worst, he will indeed be a puppet for capital (much like how Trump often served as a puppet for fascists), which will only make things worse.

Fascists

America still has over 75 million fascists, many of whom are heavily armed. One of the interesting things that were brought to our attention over the last 4 years is that this includes most of our law enforcement officers. America’s cult of radical individualism has eaten away at our ethics to the point where most of us (yes, even Democratic voters) believe that any community good is secretly an evil plot by communists.

CONCLUSION

My conclusion is that 2021 could definitely be worse than 2020. Instead of having a “gee, I sure am glad that’s over LOL” kind of attitude about it, we need to commit to continuing to work hard. And I see you heading for the liquor cabinet, but we all need you coherent and awake for what’s coming next. We all need to pay attention and think.

To that end, let me suggest a couple of people to you.

The first is Heather Cox Richardson. Her “Letters from America” series of semi-daily updates is the best single summary of US news available, in my opinion. She is a Democrat, and so you have those familiar blind spots (like unwavering faith in our democratic institutions, despite their ongoing failures) and yet I haven’t seen anything better. You can find her on Facebook, or if you’ve been banned like me, you can subscribe to Letters from America in email form.

Second is Chris Hedges. If you’re familiar with him, you know his shtick is a bit tiring and you might have discovered (like I did) that he has quite a few stances you strongly disagree with. However, he also has amazing clarity in some areas that I have not seen anywhere else. For example: The Collective Suicide of the Liberal Class

What Collapse Looks Like

In his recent piece posted on Medium, writer Indi Samarajiva describes his life in Sri Lanka during the civil war that lasted from 1983 to 2009. As with most modern conflicts, the root of it was western interference (in this case, British colonialism) and there is reason to believe that the US and UK were complicit in genocide against the Tamil people (who lost the war). However, the most interesting aspect of that period from the perspective of a person living in the US today, is that life just kept going for the most part — if you were not directly affected by the war, and most people were not.

I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There.
How life goes on, surrounded by death
by Indi Samarajiva, a writer living in Colombo, Sri Lanka

“I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens. This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.”

There are at least a couple of aspects to our collapse today in the US. The most obvious at this moment might be COVID-19 which has killed over 200,000 Americans, left possibly 2 million with permanent health issues, and sent US politics into a tailspin. But thanks to the already-existing divide between the near-right Democratic party and the far-right Republican party, and their mutual love of licking boots, there are many other things to worry about in the US today, and we’d be collapsing even without this new virus. This will get much worse before it gets better.

Climate Change: Why we failed.

The Atlantic published an article by Ed Yong entitled America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral (about the US COVID-19 failure) and I was struck by how much each of the conceptual errors he mentions also describe how the US failed to address climate change in time. While it certainly is never too late to mitigate climate disaster (lessen the devastation), our opportunity to prevent climate disaster passed quite a while ago — certainly before this year, but probably further back than that. Now, we have to move the goalposts from “stop climate disaster” to less comfortable options, like “prevent human extinction”. If we are going to do that, we can’t keep making the same mental mistakes we’ve been making since the 1970’s.

Serial Monogamy of Solutions

As with COVID-19, the US has only been able to focus on one possible approach to climate change at a time, which is unfortunate, because what is required is a massive, systemic approach addressing every aspect of the problem in a way that fits with the science. Instead, we have hyperfocused on specific things (like renewable energy, reducing use of fossil fuels, or electric cars) without bringing all the factors together. In my example, electric cars are not meaningful unless they are charged using renewable energy, and that renewable energy isn’t meaningful unless the same energy value of fossil fuels stays in the ground.

False Dichotomies

As with COVID-19, Americans have severely lacked imagination and nuance when it comes to solutions. The biggest problem is that most Americans think they’re making a choice between democracy with fossil fuels, and totalitarianism without fossil fuels. Perhaps it is because we have such a narrow view of what is good, or because we don’t understand the intricacies of climate change, or maybe it is just because so many of us have been brainwashed into believing that the only viable way to run the world is to feed our individual and collective selfishness. In fact, ignoring climate change — and continuing to increase our use of fossil fuels — has made the poverty and authoritarianism that Americans feared much more likely. And though the population of this planet is going to drop, this isn’t going to be some quick die-off like in a superhero movie, but rather a slow, dull, grinding collapse where most of the population drop comes from people choosing not to have children.

The Comfort of Theatricality

Americans love a sticker that tells them everything is fine, whether that is a starburst on a food package that says, “All Natural!”, a label on the door that says, “Sanitized!”, or something telling us that this particular approach is safer for the climate. It allows us to relax and just stop thinking about that bad thing — which means no longer taking personal responsibility for it. The latest example of this for climate was a startup that was going to build some robots that would go out into the ocean and clean up the plastic. This was a nice idea, and they received a lot of investment money, but ultimate, there’s no profit to be made from cleaning up an area that no one owns, so the startup is no more. But more importantly, while plastic cleanup is a good idea, it had absolutely no effect on climate change, which is the existential threat we should be worrying about. Amazon has a commercial in rotation on broadcast TV right now talking about how they’re going to become a net zero producer of atmospheric carbon — the problem is that they don’t let you know that they will do this with “carbon credits”. Carbon credits means that the carbon still gets produced — it’s an elaborate shell game.

Personal Blame Over Systemic Fixes

Climate is a global problem, and it will take a global, collective approach to mitigate it. If you stop buying gasoline, for example, that won’t lead to less gasoline being burned; rather, it infinitesimally drives down the cost of gasoline, and someone else will just drive a little bit more. The market sees the energy you didn’t burn, and takes it to use it for growth. Speaking of Amazon, there are people living out in the Amazon rain forest, living carbon neutral lives, and they will be destroyed before most Americans

The Normality Trap

People like to blame conservatives for climate change, but there’s no group of people who cling to normalcy more than Democratic party voters. We’ve been heavily dependent on fossil fuels for an extremely long time, so freeing ourselves from them necessarily means getting away from what is normal, and that’s going to be uncomfortable. If our collective response to this challenge is to just give up because we can’t stand the thought of varying from what we now see as normal, then that will likely mean human extinction.

Magical Thinking

Climate change mitigation requires us to somehow achieve negative carbon emissions. Given that we haven’t even figured out how to achieve anywhere close to zero carbon emissions, the suggestion that we’ll will inevitably achieve negative emissions seems insane, but that’s exactly what Americans are assuming. The difference between science fiction and fantasy is that science fiction pretends it is possible in some distant future — which is why science fiction without a concrete plan using workable technology is really just a fantasy. The fantasy that people are clinging to is called “carbon sequestration” but we still don’t have any system of carbon sequestration that scales up enough to achieve net zero global carbon emissions — and remember, we have to achieve significantly negative carbon emissions. We have to start accepting that because we failed so dramatically, we must make hard choices and following through with them.

The Complacency of Inexperience

In all of human history, we’ve never come this close to completely killing ourselves via a climate process with a 30-year lag. So, as with COVID-19 in the US, we really don’t feel the urgency required to take action now. We’re still looking around waiting to see what happens so we can decide what to do. If we’d lived through this before, we’d know how serious the problem is and likely would have already done everything required.

The Reactive Rut

COVID-19 takes weeks to show itself in a population, so by the time you react to an uptick in cases, it’s already too late. Climate change is the same, but instead of a 2-week lag, it takes 30 years to see the results of the mistakes you made today. Yet, here we are waiting to see what happens next so we can all decide what to do about it instead of listening to the climate experts who have been warning us about this since the 1970’s.

Habituation to Horror

You’ve heard the metaphor about the frog who gets boiled because they don’t notice that the water they’re in is being slowly heated to boiling. In real life, a frog reaches a temperature threshold, and then jumps out. Humans on the other hand are so incredibly adaptive that we’re the ones who will end up being boiled to death. (OK, it’s true that all the amphibians will be killed by our recklessness first.) We’ve already habituated to a ridiculous amount of horror. I suppose it will be interesting to see if we ever notice how destructive we are and jump out of the proverbial pan. (The pan is capitalism.)