Resistance Rising
We have the tools. Do we have the courage?
My personal circumstances continue to be challenged. With the death of my father, my sister and I (and my awesome brother-in-law) are challenged. My mother has profound memory loss, and preserving her dignity as difficult decisions and changes need to be made are a sensitive and heartbreaking process. The frequency of my writing will likely continue to be diminished, but not the urgency or quality. I am in this come what may, regardless of my words personal consequences. Truth must be spoken.
Here is the full Whitman quote:
To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty. — Walt Whitman
When I started writing here in September 2021 it was to communicate that which is inarguably foundational to humanity’s future — an inhabitable planet. I was inspired by my connections on Twitter which included climate scientists, and some of the courageous journalists willing to speak truth in an increasingly fraught and always critical profession, ultimately our bulwark against tyranny. Twitter, which I left long ago has been reduced to a Nazi sympathetic platform of hatred and misogyny, a calculated move by the ketamine fueled South African apartheid product known as Elon Musk, a subhuman normalized by our spiraling mainstream “culture,” even appearing on Saturday Night Live as if the dufus can deliver a joke. His move paid off, and he is now illegally attempting to eliminate every hard-earned right, protection and social safety net we’ve ever won through his “DOGE” — by unionizing, marching, shedding blood and dying as I write — as well as conveniently eliminating federal investigations into his billions of dollars in government contracts that made him obscenely wealthy. His actions are in absolute defiance of the constitution (only congress has the right to make funding decisions, not a political appointee), and the massive damage being caused are enabled by a Republican controlled congress cowed by the malignancy of Trump, and too corrupt to do their jobs.
Ketamine is an anesthetic and used to treat depression. Apparently, being the wealthiest person in the world doesn’t fill the hole in Musk’s soul or the other rich sociopaths and cowards driving the planet over the cliff.
The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.
— Thomas Paine
The fight for freedom has never been fully achieved, not even close, ask any so-called minority or non-heterosexual person living in fear today. Ask any Native American living in abject poverty on a reservation, their cultures destroyed by genocidal invaders possessing the same psychopathic traits of Trump and Musk. Capitalism, an unsustainable model itself built on the destruction of the planet, was put on steroids by the emergence of neoliberal economics in the 1970s, an even more virulent plague initially unleashed in Chile by Nixon, Kissinger and the CIA. It swept virtually every country on the planet, privatizing entire countries natural resources through economic blackmail backed by the threat and use of military power. In Chile, where disappearances and murders became the norm, the junta drove cars supplied by Ford. Ford even had a jail in its Buenos Aires factory for union organizers who voiced dissension (Naomi Klein’s great investigative book The Shock Doctrine details this). Similar happened in Argentina a few years later, including more assassinations and torture. Circulating the world for fifty years, with millions of victims, you and I are now in the crosshairs. That includes you Fox “news” fuckheads, so wake up. This is the nature of the insatiable need for power, driven by holes in souls never filled. It’s unchecked sickness.
I love this America more than any other country in this world, and for exactly this reason I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
— James Baldwin
This sickness won’t be satisfied until everything and everyone on the planet is dead, forcing the perps to ride it out in the boredom of their luxury bunkers, how sad. We’re in the New Age of Robber Barons, but this time extinction is the end game. Quit Bezos’ Amazon and Whole Foods, Zuckerberg’s Facebook, and Instagram for fuck's sake. Beat your Tesla with a sledgehammer on your front lawn, or encourage its tendency to spontaneously combust. Your money and participation fuels your death.
As frightening as the billionaire and Christo fascist takeover of government are and immediate the need to fight them tooth and claw NOW, our nearing date with extinction is even more sobering. That deadline lies in ever delayed and inadequate action on climate change and overshoot. If you’re not familiar with the overshoot, I don’t blame you — the docile media never touches it. You can get the basics here. Climate change is just one component in a set of nine planetary boundaries identified by science, six of which are breached. For additional frets, consider the rapidly approaching end of economically viable oil drilling. Yes, sorry people, oil is finite. Dwindling deposits forced energy intensive fracking, and oil is fated to become too expensive to create a return on investment. What then?
And those annoying Lincoln SUV EVs self-satisfied Mathew McConaughey likes to advertise? They can’t be manufactured or powered without fossil fuels, nor can lithium be mined for batteries. It’s a zero-sum fake game. Nor can we destroy the environment with thousands of acres of wind turbines and solar panels. Why? No fossil fuels means no concrete and steel manufacturing, and no diesel to run heavy equipment. Doh.
Oil company geologists knew the truth about CO2 caused climate change and the finite nature of oil deposits fifty years ago. An excellent three-part Frontline documentary on those facts can be found here. Fossil fuel driven overshoot and climate change spell the end, but as destructive as oil has been to the planet and our bodies, the entire world economy is based on burning it. We’re damned if we burn it and damned if we don’t. It didn’t have to be this way, but societal, economic and ecological collapse are driven by pathology, behavior embodied by the likes of the Koch brothers, Murdoch family, Peter Thiel, and Musks and Trumps of this world. Knowing, but not revealing and weaning off of oil when we had time in favor of power and profit is proof of mass sociopathy at its finest, crossing into psychopathy, real world evil, not the bullshit supernatural crap the drooling masses soak up on Netflix. This apocalypse has been brought to you by the Lincoln Navigator, get one today.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.
— Thomas Jefferson
I’ve been begging people to create change with their money for years, to move their accounts out of fossil fuel banks (check out these links here and here) and boycott, better yet, permanently eliminate unnecessary consumption. Last Friday’s “economic blackout” was cute, but that’s about it. When voting gets us two flavors of collapse, money is a direct tool to starve the vampires, sure, but it’s going to take much more than one day of delaying voluntary purchases to save us. Even boycotting for the rest of our lives can’t be enough. The planet is crossing tipping points, we’re out of time. The Greenland ice sheet for instance has been doomed for seventy years. It will melt completely. That’s a fact. That means Boston, Manhattan and Miami are done.
Talk about a catch-22. The End of Oil means worldwide economic and societal collapse, but burning it means the same. We’ve had ample time to prepare — as I said, oil company geologists knew the truth about CO2 caused climate change and the finite nature of oil deposits fifty years ago. We could have taken the right steps, but hey, there was money to be made.
Now the shit is hitting the fan on multiple fronts, and we are on the cusp of losing our homes, health, physical security, freedoms, and any hope of a future for our children. My daughter will be all of 24 years old this spring. She does not expect to live a full life. What does one say to their child when they know this to be likely? This is the world oil executive sociopaths, their political sycophants, and the military industrial complex Eisenhower warned us of have built, evil decision by evil decision, a death trap for all. Hell, the US military knew at least as early as 1990, and were planning for competing with Russia and China as the Arctic melts. I wrote about that here when Biden opened up Willow in Alaska for drilling. Why? What was the logic? I figured it out, and my thesis is well backed from remarkably available military papers. You’re not a person, just a statistical byproduct, a pawn in world chess.
We proceeded from steam to coal to oil, ever mightier machines to devour the planet, and spew our psychological sickness into the air and soil, ultimately absorbed by our bodies and brains. We eschewed the slow, wise decisions of Mother Earth, opting for speedy industrial planetary scale destruction starting with the enslavement of people of color from continents far away, shipped like logs in the holds of leaking, diseased wooden ships, dying at a fifty percent rate. Teeth checked, limbs shackled, backs whipped, women raped, those who survived built the backbone of the now crumbling American empire beating by beating. The asylum we live in today has been brought to you by Febreeze so you don’t smell the stink.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
— Mark Twain
Capitalism has reached its logical conclusion. When there’s nothing left to share, you get fascism. With the planet stripped, and economic inequality never greater, we have the most successful moron of all time, a “strong man,” a doughy, narcissistic moron making everything great again, a person with no connection to science or reality, elected by those who don’t understand he would gladly use them as fertilizer on his Mar-a-Lago sleaze hotel golf course if needed. As he and hatchet man Musk destroy the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the EPA, threaten FEMA, set their eyes on pillaging Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare and remove all references to climate change from federal websites, fertilizer comparisons becomes all too real. Oh yeah, and bird flu is coming right along.
Guess what Fox “news” watchers, they’re coming for your racist white asses now, too. They ran out of the other convenient victims. Need a job? Forget about it. That’s what AI is for. BTW, before you ream me out as a “liberal,” the planet doesn’t care about political labels, and I’ve harped on liberals, too. We’ve ALL been sold for parts. It’s class warfare, baby, it’s always class warfare to divide us. Consider the infamous radium girls painting aircraft dials during WWII who died of brutal jaw cancer from pointing toxic brushes with their lips, while the United States Radium Corporation denied. That was a long time ago, but instructive of the eternal nature of evil. Think of the diseased lungs of coal miners. Consider the workers blown up in the massive environmental disaster of the Deep Horizon oil spill. Money doesn’t give a shit about clean water, safe food, or life, human or otherwise. Hell, disaster is a money making opportunity.
As one of our few great presidents campaigning against Herbert Hoover in 1933 with the specter of Nazi Germany rising, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said:
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
That wasn’t quite true, as the situation then as today required risk and ultimately bloodshed to be stopped. That risk can be embodied in physical confrontation or in choosing to speak truth. I am 63, little good in physical confrontation, but I do not stand down in the face of evil. I hope my words help you and others stand up, too. To not is to lose everything without a fight.
No one is coming to save us. It’s up to me and you.
Thank you, Kathleen, and yes, Hedge's address was excellent! I boosted it, the man is usually on target. There is no other way now, the opportunity was squandered at least 50 years ago.
Geoff: I have been focused on conventional actions that help me think through activity, rather than dwell on the evil surrounding us. I protested at the NOT MY PREZ day in front of the Cleveland courthouse, wrote to PBS about closing its DEI office, was featured in an article titled "Diversity, By Any Other Name" and joined a local Indivisible Group Chapter to participate in tangible events.
Your writing is always informative. I appreciate it. Now is the time to take action to protest what we have left of a country rather than fall into hopelessness. I like the comments from readers on kindness as we navigate through the abyss.