I have a bone to pick, sort of, re: the Women’s Marches. I am “with them” enough to join in any such marches, to be sure. This certainly needs to stir us up to the point of mobilizing for not only marching, but working “behind the scenes” wherever we can. But, I get the sense that our Ecological Crisis is not generating the same level of reaction and mobilizing. It actually needs MORE. Not in the sense of a limited supply of mobilization that gets taken away from Women’s issues and given over to Ecological Issues. But letting what’s at stake drive the mobilization. SEEING that what’s at stake is more urgent than ANYTHING, only in the sense that there really is limited time to act if we are to hope for a more livable planet for most all of life, including our own.
Bill McKibben has articulated this of late:
“If we don’t win very quickly on climate change, then we will never win. That’s the core truth about global warming. It’s what makes it different from every other problem our political systems have faced”
“In fact, that’s the problem with climate change. It won’t stand still. Health care is a grave problem in the U.S. right now too, one that Donald Trump seems set on making steadily worse. If his administration manages to defund Obamacare, millions of people will suffer. But if, in three years’ time, some new administration takes over with a different resolve, it won’t have become exponentially harder to deal with our health care issues. That suffering in the interim wouldn’t have changed the fundamental equation. But with global warming, the fundamental equation is precisely what’s shifting. “
And so now, back to me: Just like healthcare which McKibben uses as example above, Women’s issues are also one without the same type of time limit. Although “time’s up” is being used to rally us to speak up and end the harassment of women, it isn’t the same kind of “Time’s up” as it is for our Climate/Eco-Crisis. It is not that I am saying anything remotely like these are not also important. But we DO need to garner up MORE (if not JUST AS MUCH, at the least, as in : we know we can rally THIS BIG for women’s issues, we can therefore do the same (and actually, even more) for Climate issues.
But alas, it just doesn’t seem to sinking in and hitting us as a collective to the degree that the harassment issues have hit since the election of the harasser-in-chief. We need to realize more of a sense of a “direct hit” on us at an even deeper level, since what is at stake here is a level of destruction that is unprecedented in human history. So unprecedented, in fact, that “social” issues, all of which any society with courage to act and grow will , indeed, act and transform, will become things that won’t matter much anymore next to the issue of survival itself, and horrific social and economic upheavals as humans deal with the shock to the system.
Maybe this isn’t an ideal time to post this. Maybe I should wait until tomorrow. I don’t at all wish to minimize or lessen the importance of the women’s marches (and they are HUGE, frm what I can see so far). But then, on the other hand, this whole thought came to me as I sit here amongst all the pictures and videos of the various marches today, and it is the intensity to which I need to point as example of what we already see we CAN DO. We need to get better at bringing home the urgency of the time to act. That time is NOW, and we are already FAR FAR behind where we need to have been by now. And in failing to do so, we are losing so much that can NEVER be recovered.
Bill McKibben: Winning Slowly Is the Same as Losing
Bill McKibben: Winning Slowly Is the Same as Losing
The technology exists to combat climate change – what will it take to get our leaders to act?
Source: www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/bill-mckibben-winning-slowly-is-the-same-as-losing-w512967
