The Daily: 19 January 2024

I feel like I have been complaining quite a bit lately. I don’t mean to be… ok, maybe I do… and why not! We should all be complaining. We should all be loudly expressing our discontent with the damage a few greedy humans have done and continue to do to our world, to our lives, and to our life support systems. There is utterly no reason to suck it up and bear any of this stoically. This is my life. This is all there is. And they are stealing me from me. Stealing you from you too, I’ll wager. So shout those complaints! If there is anything worthy of complaint, it is having your life and your future destroyed for the idiotic whims of a few useless humans.

I hadn’t actually thought of it that way until driving home the other night on roads that were completely white, passing several accidents on the way and taking more than an hour and a half to drive about twenty miles. That’s just too much time to consider the time and resources being wasted. Puts one in a terribly grumbly mood.

And the worst thing about that is I’m doing fairly well, relatively speaking. I have been through flood damage, severe illness, several jobs eliminated in as many years. I’ve had money stolen from my bank account and have mail delivery maybe one or two days a week. The power goes out regularly, often for no clear reason. The flooding in my garage is intractable; my basement is dangerously damp; and the house needs siding and a new roof. There’s almost no hope of getting solar panels, and I can’t put a heat pump in this house without doing a complete rewiring, which is quite beyond my means. I can’t go for a walk in the woods without pulling ticks off my body and can only hope that I don’t miss the wrong one and end up with another round of Lyme disease. There is no retirement in my future, and I have to work full time, probably doing a job that doesn’t mean anything to me or anyone else, until I can go on Medicare (a perpetually receding target date) because there is also no health insurance — and I have several issues that require regular medical care. I don’t have much debt besides this house, but I also don’t have much income; and if more than one expensive disaster were to strike in a season, I would almost certainly be homeless in fairly short order.

But… my house is standing and it is warm(ish) and I have a job that pays my mortgage. I have a mortgage and am not stuck in the economic black hole that is renting a place to live. No fires have burnt down my town. The flood made messes and permanently leveled the pizza landscape, but most people and businesses and homes have survived. We have nutritious food and clean water and maple syrup. This is one of the best localized economies in the world. My family and friends are mostly alive and well(ish). I have fantastic sons and sisters and parents and I actually like all of them. I work with mostly good people. I live in a beautiful place that still has seasons. And, while there are and will continue to be changes, this place is fairly well insulated from the worst symptoms of biophysical collapse.

So I’m doing materially and socially better than probably 80% of the world. I find that rather depressing.

Even so, I am not complaining. Not really. What I am doing is being honest and bearing witness. This is what is actually happening in one very average, maybe even above average, life. If it’s happening to me, it is certainly happening to millions of others and worse is happening in the lives of billions. Yet we don’t hear these stories, not in any kind of relational framing. There isn’t enough bearing witness. There are random reports of the disaster of the day, but nothing is ever put in context. A camera shows us a splintered home. A microphone is shoved into a sobbing woman’s face. A somber narrator shakes his head. And then it’s on to the sports headlines. Or a car ad…

This is why I write. In truth, this is why most real journalists write. We are trying to tell the story of the world as we are experiencing it so that it is known and remembered. We are recording and sharing information. The more this is done, the harder it is for false narratives to take hold. If everybody paid attention and recorded their observations, disinformation would never find an audience.

These stories need to be told, and told in context. There were headlines about the flooding in central Vermont, but before we’d even managed to get the debris off the Main Streets, the headlines had moved on to other disasters. The story was not fully told before it was forgotten. When news is scattershot like that, there is no story. (How does flooding in Vermont relate to fire in Hawaii?) There is no coherence, no analysis of cause and relationship, no making sense of any of it. So none of it means anything. None of it can be felt. None of it is correlated with experience anywhere else. (How does flooding in Vermont relate to your life? How do you feel about Vermont flooding? What other stories are in that overarching story and do any of those stories affect you?)

There is so very little that is not connected and interdependent. I would be very surprised if you, wherever you are, are not affected in any way by the story of Vermont floods. Or Hawaiian fires. Or war in the Middle East. But you can’t form a map of that relationship from simply viewing snapshots on a screen. Worse, you can’t feel the emotions of the whole story when all you have is a random picture. Viewing screen headlines does not relate the information presented to anything else, certainly not the viewer. It all becomes entertainment, another way to dull our senses and distract us from what we are experiencing — so that we don’t recognize what we are experiencing and begin to make sense of it… and learn what is causing the parts we would dearly prefer to not experience.

I would like to counter that. I am recording what I am experiencing, and I would ask all of my readers to do the same and compare those notes. Open up your senses and be alive to what is happening. Don’t just view the disasters of some vague and unknown Other. Be fully aware and note the disaster in your own life. Write it down or record it in some other durable fashion so you can keep track of changes. What passes for disaster today may be a pretty good day in a year or two. We need to remember and relate it all.

When was the last time you saw a bat or a swallow or a butterfly? Does your tap water smell different than it used to? How often does it rain and what kind of rain is falling, mist or torrents? Is that what you remember from childhood? Is it what you remember from a decade ago? How often are you without electricity? What does that mean in your life? How much are you paying for carrots? For milk? For paper and packing tape? How has that changed? Did you notice it changing? What used to be on those now perpetually empty shelves in grocery stores and pharmacies? Do you miss it? Have you tried to fix anything recently? How easy was it to source skilled labor or parts and tools? Is that the same process that it used to be? How many things need fixing every day? Is that different? Did things used to last longer and work better? How much more time does it take to merely turn on the television and find something you might want to watch? What else could you have done with that time? When did you last have time to do something just for your own body, your own pleasure? When did you last feel healthy and well rested? How many of your friends are depressed? Or ill? How many have decided that they will never be able to have a home of their own, a decent job, respect, children, enough sleep? When did you last feel happy? And what caused that…

These are the stories that matter. These are the stories of our lives and how the current way we live is changing how we are able to live. These are the stories of what is actually happening. The more you record, the more connections you make. The more everyone records, the more connections we all make with each other. None of these stories are being told by commercial media. They can’t be, because those who buy the commercials don’t want those stories to be told or those connections to be made. Advertisers can’t afford for you to notice that what they are selling is the destruction of your life. So of course, the only way these stories will be told is through projects like this one. Truthfully, there is only one good use of a privilege level that enables you to use the internet — it’s this capacity to share honestly with each other and with relatively less manipulation from those who are profiting from all these disasters.

And make no mistake, there are disasters everywhere. It’s not just Vermont or Hawaii or Otherwhere… It is everywhere. Everything. It is you. This culture is taking away your single chance of being you. You are the tool of those who would take as much from this world as they can steal before the world dies. (Have you noticed the number of these idiots who think they will live forever? Or at least a very long time… Where? On what?) You have no life of your own. Nor does anything else. And crushing the life out of everything is a disaster. It is a disaster with radiating cascades of disasters in all directions. The worst part is that you are forced to make this disaster upon yourself.

As long as we remain blind, we will continue to harm ourselves. As long as we do not see the connections between what we do — for wages, for meeting our needs, for entertainment — and the pain we experience every day — depression, illness, despair, fear, death — then we will keep harming ourselves. And rewarding the assholes who benefit from this system.

I, for one, am done with not living this one life of mine so that some jerk can have a few more dollars in his bank account and the power to make damaging decisions over lives that are none of his concern. All so that some lazy asshole can make others do the care and reproductive work he doesn’t want to do… because it’s beneath him. I am done with causing myself and all that I love this pain and suffering. And I don’t want anyone else to waste decades before they make the connection between this toxic culture and the hurt they see and feel. So I am complaining loudly about it. I am shouting. I am waving my hands in the air and jumping up and down… ok, not really.

But I am writing down what is happening and trying my hardest to show that all of this is connected. I’m likewise trying my hardest to persuade others to pay attention, record or otherwise remember what is happening, and feel those connections and relationships. Central Vermont flooding is not a thing in isolation. It is the clear and easily predicted result of a known cause. It is clearly caused by climate change which is clearly caused by increased energy in the atmosphere which is clearly caused by increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which is clearly caused by burning massive amounts of stored hydrocarbons — which is clearly caused by the capital imperative. Which is supported and reproduced by you… and me… and all the rest of us who are affected by our own parts of the Disaster.

The tragedy of this story is that so many lives were completely wasted, used up, churned into wealth for a few greedy humans. They were forced to waste their lives so that we could… watch screens. We don’t remember them. We don’t know them or feel their pain. We are hardly aware of their central role in building the infrastructure of our lives. We do not tell their stories and we do not know that their stories are ours. We could be them. In a few decades, will anyone remember us? Except as the culture that devoured itself and most of the planet for a few dollars in a few bank accounts to buy a bit of power over strangers. We are building their future lives, the foundations of their stories. If we have children or young friends, we are preparing them for that future, giving them the only tools and knowledge and support that they will have. Will we pass on the pain and the ignorance?

Or will we start to notice what is happening and make connections and feel these stories and maybe, just maybe, begin to figure out a way out of disaster?

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024