I have many friends who are despairing that, with Bernie Sanders’s exit from the presidential race, the United States has lost a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to elect a leader who is honest, reliable, and completely untethered to the vested interests that keep our whole system careening towards catastrophe (climate change, ecological collapse, mass extinction, out-of-control AI, an authoritarian global security state, and the inequities that breed the conflicts and terrorisms that engender wars both conventional and nuclear, chemical, biological, and cybernetic — we haven’t seen anything yet, folks). Bernie’s style was not for everyone, granted, but Joe Biden seems like yet another DNC loser to these people (I share their skepticism), promoting a “back to normal” that is neither realistic nor convincing in the face of these challenges.
The illiberal right knows all these things and knows how to win elections in their midst: by stoking the fears of disasters to come (real or unreal), they know their followers will see no way out except through building border walls and shutting the floodgates. In the short term they will likely continue winning.
The big picture is this: the coming decades will bring cascading crises of which this pandemic is but a small harbinger. There will be no “return to normal.” But the pandemic (and each next crisis) will also show that change is both possible and necessary. As long as those of us who recognize that and who know what kind of change is needed (building a just and socially and ecologically sustainable world) continue doing that, with perseverance, Gandhian satyagraha (truth-force), and love, there’s hope that we’ll get through it despite the disasters and die-offs to come.
Individually we will each get to the same moment of decision: to fight for our piece of a collapsing pie, or to get with the program. How we respond to that moment will define us.
That’s something to live for, I figure. Things are what they are (so it’s best to accept them); you do what you can (though first you might have to figure out what that is); you hope for the best (for the hell of it).
Note: The pictures here are from Wim Wenders’ 1982 film The State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge), about a film crew stuck at the Portuguese seaside after they run out of funding and film stock, rather like global capitalism is running out of its own production money and ideas. The film is brilliant. In real life, Wenders had been put on hold by producer Frances Ford Coppola during the filming of Hammett, so he traveled to Portugal to help out his friend Raul Ruiz with film stock for the latter’s (equally brilliant, civilization-descends-into-barbarity-in-the-French-wilderness flick) The Territory. Wenders hired Ruiz’s film crew and cast to film The State of Things. The aimless, life-put-on-hold melancholy of the film, combined with its jab at Hollywood (which we can amplify to our favorite jab-target), resonates well these days, I think.
