We, humanity on the whole, face some pretty novel challenges — at least when we’re looking at the particulars. When we look at our challenges in principle, though, our manifold perils are only unprecedented in scale and complexity. The nature of each troubling circumstance facing humanity is well covered territory.
We have big drug problems in the U.S. right now. We developed outstandingly effective pain killers. Now, for many people whose whole lives are a source of pain, it’s hard to imagine life without them — not to mention that these drugs are medically risky to quit. But, just before prohibition, things were actually kinda similar with alcohol. An enormous amount of the population was made up of shaky drunks, folks who needed something hard with breakfast just to see straight. From our contemporary perspective, mostly because of lots of gangster movies, we see the prohibition experiment as a terrible idea. But it’s possible that it saved us all. Whether it did or not, the point is that we’ve been here before.
Some folks say that we have an environmental crisis on our hands, but I find that the single environmental crisis framing is what opens the door for a lot of dead end conversations. As someone who spent a lot of time going door-to-door talking to people about ecological issues, I can reasonably say that the ecological conversation is less sensationalized and divisive when one points out that we don’t have one but thousands of ecological crises. I went from canvasing to testifying in front of legislative bodies to coaching people to speak in front of legislative bodies and the media. What grounds those conversations is talking about specific points of ecological devastation. Talking about the loss of old growth forests in general is easily met with a lot of spin about negative deforestation in North America — even though those statistics are wildly inflated by genetically engineered monocrop forests that are terrible for ecosystems and present the worst fire hazards. But, when we point to something specific, like that time Boise Cascade threw a fit about losing a logging road subsidy by putting eye screws in the bottoms of a bunch of trees and dragging them through the forest, destroying undergrowth and habitat, killing tens of thousands of animals, and setting off a series of localized natural disasters, it gets harder to spin. The earth as a whole can, and likely will, shake us off — if we despoil enough environments. So, the whole “we’re killing the earth” argument can always be defeated. But! “We wrecked this specific ecosystem and now it’s bitting us in the ass.” That argument holds more water than an aquifer near a Pepsi office.
The pivot in argument works because it’s factual. We have thousands of ecological crises which are crystal clear. We can point to any oil spill or pine beetle infested clear cut and no one can credibly deny that it’s pretty awful. Maybe those add up to one global situation of concern, but we haven’t proven ourselves to be any good at solving complex global problems. With specific and localized problems we have a somewhat better track record. From natural disasters like volcanic eruptions to more human calamities like a distillery flooding a whole township with eighty proof nectar of heaven, we’ve been dealing with these things forever. Taken one at a time, we either know how to deal with each ecological crisis or we know how to figure it out.
War. That’s a doozy. Will Iran step in to stop Israel from becoming the worst hypocrite in all history? Will China and Russia back them? Is that World War III in the making? Would it be the worst thing that’s ever happened? Maybe? I have basically no answers to any of those questions. More informed people than me have real opinions on those matters, which probably aren’t even the right questions to be asking. And, hopefully by the time you’re reading this all of those questions seem absurd. But I can tell you this, we’ve done this song and dance before. As a gen x cusp, I have a pretty clear memory of huddling under desks with my hands on the back of my neck, of watching black and white short films on what to do if the Soviets nuke us and invade. Not only did we live in speculative fear of World War III but the general consensus was that it wouldn’t last very long. I knew all of that as a seven year old living in a neighborhood where the kids just a little older than me were really killing each other. I couldn’t be protected from the abstract projections of death or the visceral reality of it. It was in the streets and it was in the media as a constant drone note, “At any moment an egotistical political decision or a miscommunication from a submarine could end all human life on earth, and here’s Susan with the traffic report.”
Drugs and social decay, ecological devastation and mass extinction, war and social unrest, none of these are new. When Bush bombed the civilian population of Baghdad for forty-eight hours under false pretenses, a few Iraqis responded by pointing out that he still didn’t come close to the body count of that time Baghdad was sacked by the Mongolian Horde. And Baghdad persists.
We are strong.
Humans, not only Iraqis. People are horrifyingly, brutally, beautifully strong.
Most people don’t create robust documentation of their struggles. Even those few people who succeed at solving their problems rarely write about it. But there are so many people, and our problems are so consistent, that no matter what problem you are concerned with there are more documented cases of people solving that problem than you would ever be able to sort through.
For almost no problems do we need new solutions. We need to read.
We do need insightful curators, archivists, socially involved practitioners, and generally better organization. But we don’t generally need new answers. We do need to eliminate our aversion to expertise, to the pursuit of mastery — to the foolish and self-sabotaging notion that ‘master’ is a dirty word. We need these things if we don’t want our societies to die of sheer negligence. Too many people have glorified those who are too stubborn to grow. Our society promotes those who would rather stay weak and pathetic just to avoid being the person to blame.
And I’m not just talking about leftists and liberals here. Every blue blooded American who thinks that an immigrant stole their job is doing exactly as I’ve described above. Did someone show up and make a better offer than you? Did they work harder? Were they more efficient? Maybe you say that they stole your job by being willing to do it for less. Well there are two problems with that. If they can live and thrive on less — throw better parties, make better food, while raising more kids — and do a satisfactory job all the while, then maybe you were overcharging? Or maybe you never did the half of your job that is making sure that society knows what quality is and how to value it. Either way, you just got complacent. Nature has strong feelings and unmarked graves for complacent species. Oh, it’s the greedy fat cats that are just looking to cut corners? Well who are their customers? Who are they taking orders from? Who buys what they’re selling? Are you one of them? Every Walmart parking lot hosts a daily parade of the only group of people who should be blamed for killing the American middle class.
How many union meetings did you attend before complaining about the decline of your trade? How much homework did you do before each? Did you check your union leaders when they neglected to advocate for the end user — your real life blood? Did you give up when it got hard? Who told you any of this was supposed to be easy? Who told you that someone wouldn’t come for you job — or that they shouldn’t? What part of the nature of life made you think that you were entitled to anything, let alone consistent unchanging vocational satisfaction in an ever-changing world?
Welcome to earth. Here, all the glorious splendor of life comes with teeth, tentacles, and taciturn tenacity.
Good luck.
The complacency of victimhood and excuse-making runs through every class and political affiliation in the United States. Same tune, different scapegoats.
The solution to every problem is not only available and well documented but the first steps are basically the same for each.
- Stop making excuses.
- Take ownership.
- Hit the books.
For the rest of this chapter I’m going to get specific about some of the bigger problems in society, the known solutions to them, and my observations and speculations as to why folks abstain from efficacious action — frequently in favor of much more laborious coping mechanisms. It’s not going to be pretty. It’s not going to make friends. But, it is with love.
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