Birds Before The Storm, November 6, 2024
I can’t tell you things are fine. I can’t tell you that hard times aren’t coming. I can’t tell you that hard times aren’t already here. Things can always get worse. That seems like, more or less, a constant in this universe: things can always get worse.
The thing is, though, things can always get better too. We can make things get better.
Maybe the biggest problem with election years is that we seem to collectively forget that we have agency outside of voting. We forget that our actions have direct, measurable impact on the world. Our non-voting actions even impact the outcome of elections: as CrimethInc pointed out, the George Floyd Uprising of 2020 had a direct and measurable impact keeping Trump from winning the election that year.
Of course, the George Floyd Uprising wasn’t trying to get Biden elected, it was trying to stop racist police violence. Moderate reforms are won by making radical demands. If you demand moderate reforms, you generally get, well, nothing.
The Democrats gambled on the perpetuation of an old, dying (dead?) status quo and it cost them the election. The old status quo is gone. To quote that old saying by Antonio Gramsci, “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Let us midwife the new world that wants to be born.
How?
Hard times are in front of us. Fascism is on the rise in the US and its likely to replace the old neoliberal capitalist empire with something still worse. Climate change is not only inevitable, it is here. The climate will get more and more unstable and will, no matter what we do, for the rest of our lives and for the rest of our children’s lives.
We are in crisis.
Crisis is opportunity. I absolutely do not want to celebrate the fact that we are in crisis. It is not good. But it affords certain opportunities, ones that we need to engage with. What we do in the coming three months, what we do in the coming year, will have enormous impact on, well, the fate of the entire world, the people who live on that world, and the ecosystems that are woven across its surface. I know this sounds hyperbolic, but we live in hyperbolic times.
