There’s something hopelessly depressing reading chronicles of disasters, of war, of your run of the mill violent destruction. It’s watching from afar, and usually after the fact, and with no hope of having effect on outcomes. Like a chronicle of the civil war in Syria, like this one, a war still raging and now involving multiple countries and conflicts. It seems so distant and yet once you read enough you become invested in the tragedy. It’s journalism, though, not philosophy of what could be, if only.
That’s just one little part of the world, though an important one at that. Ultimately, however, we’re all chroniclers, of one sort or another, of a tragedy unfolding on an even grander scale than just some regional conflict killing a few tens of thousand, a typical brutality and violence taking apart the Mideast, yet again, and in no small part on account of the west. That greater “tragedy” I speak of, a poignant word, is the climate crisis and the inevitable effects on the populations of the planet in the coming decades. It’s already here, we know, for instance drought in the countries of the Arab spring that had a significant effect on those movement’s initial spark. But what’s to come is surely of a scale far worse.
Those of us not balanced on the precipice of old age and death will be witness to this calamity. We will surely witness vast numbers of climate refugees displaced by rising waters and encroaching deserts, by crop failures and famines, dead seas and drying rivers. We’ll see even more refugees displaced by wars and conflicts and violence as a result. More destruction. More death and misery. As long as nothing changes, mind you, in the centers of power, and quickly.
It’s a privileged position to have such a view, sheltered from the worse of it, but perhaps not forever. The chance to witness as a social and economic system, that promises great riches to all, finally run its course and come up against a climate that simply says “too much already”. To witness great migrations of peoples and countries as they fall left and right under the strain, while the wealthy in their northern cities tighten their borders in a vain attempt to squelch the flow of the miserable, and continue unabated in internal “public relations”.
It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. Nothing is written in stone as far as the future goes. With the calamity will come life affirming responses, too. And seeing such remarkable resistance as the communalist Kurds defend Kobane have shown, in recent weeks, that a glimmer of hope, the possibility of the good people, can overcome the hopelessness of the death cults of IS. Perhaps the kind and compassionate among us will rise to the occasion and somehow overtake those particular death cults here in America, in charge, that would willingly drive us over the cliff. Or so we must believe in order to retain our sanity.
But for now I’ll sit back and watch, and maybe, like many kind souls, do what one mere soul can, concretely, to help it along in the right direction. Beyond retweeting. And keep a chronicle. For those in the future who may want to look back at how it all went down. If, of course, there’s anyone left to do the looking.
TFG Casper
