Will it? Shall we allow climate change to drive global cooperation or world dictatorship?
Either way, apocalypse looms. Doesn’t mean it’ll land in our laps, tho. Better get ready to growl. Yes, start growling.
Greta Thunberg chastised her fellow humans the world over for our collective failure to act and to act now to address the engines of our own extinction. She pointed out we already have the solutions. We know what to do. We already know what we must do to successfully address our current interlocking, wicked problems of global climate disruption, Anthropocene global warming, and the Holocene mass extinction. She doesn’t need to wait to grow up and earn her PhD. She can’t. We cannot wait. Yet we do.
We as a species remain divided into hundreds of squabbling nation-states and thousands of quarreling stateless-nations. We remain divided by socio-economic class, ethnicity, culture, religion, politics, economics, finance, sexuality, gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, appearance, and levels of education. So many things split us apart from one another we fail to recognize how much more we share in common as Homo sapiens of Earth, third planet from the Sun. We still argue with each other over our isms while secretly wishing all of those on the other side would simply die or somehow vanish. We debate the intricacies of global cybersecurity and of the space race between China and the U.S.A. to colonize the Moon and Mars without considering these may all be silly and moot with our world roiled by crises of our own making.
Capitalism has come to dominate the world and improve the lives of many but at great cost, a staggering cost. Many people at the same time cannot bring themselves to embrace democratic socialism, what the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., used to call “economic democracy,” even tho all nations have some degree of hybridization. Expanding democracy into the workplace and the realms of economics and finance is NOT at all synonymous with Soviet and Maoist Communist Totalitarianism. Nor with fascism or what Hitler’s followers mislabeled as “national socialism,” i.e. Nazism. Balancing out our individual liberties and established rights with evolving social responsibilities is not an invitation to tyranny and despotism.
Climate change and mass extinction, however, already loom. Not to mention Earth revolves around the Sun thru disturbed clusters of asteroids. We barely miss massive solar flares and comets flung in from the Oort Cloud. We ignore our magnetosphere will collapse temporarily during the long-overdue magnetic pole reversal. Supposedly when the magnetic poles ziggity-zaggety-flip it’ll be just long enough to allow in bursts of cosmic ray protons before the poles reset. We can’t handle knowing impending supervolcanos could trigger a mini-ice age. Not to mention climate change is accelerating the evolution of disease pathogens from influenza viruses to parasitic amoebas to candida yeast as mysterious Disease X lurks in the background. Aye, so much doom and gloom!
Wouldn’t it be ironic if climate change accelerates the corrosion and breakdown of our global civilization before we can transcend all the isms and schisms dividing us today with such suspicion, hatred, and violence? Don’t we have the cognitive intelligence and the technology to unite our species across the planet to overcome our interlocking global challenges? Yes! Do we not have the capacity to work together and even play together to address all of those worldwide wicked problems currently overwhelming us? Of course we do!
As social bipedal mammals we know the benefits of building a democratic planetary republic with some kind of democratic world parliament far outweighs the cost. We also know our species lacks deep wisdom. We lack emotional intelligence and maturity. We still posture like juvenile gangs and sneer at love, peace, and compassion. We faun over acknowledging we are at choice as we recognize there are so many amazing possibilities yet dismiss the very idea of standing in a circle holding hands together with our enemies to sing some post-modern, secular version of “Kumbaya” as dangerously naive. So instead we just keep sailing along into further polarization and eventual fragmentation? Surrendering to strongmen imposing their version of order upon a self-destructing world? Allow others to manipulate our capacity for global cooperation to establish instead a world dictatorship? Tyranny will not solve our problems and will make all of them worse. Dictators simply like to stand up above others and, intoxicated by the sound of their own voices, bark and yap at the rest of us while their ships goes down and their cities burn up.
So what the hell are we going to do? Together? Now? We’re gonna have to do more than just growl back, y’know. Even growling’s a start, tho. So growl, dammit, GROWL!!!
William Dudley Bass
Wednesday 23 October 2019
Wednesday 22 January 2020
Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Earth
Sol
Copyright © 2019, 2020 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.