Excruciating “12 #climate resolutions” – you have to weep for this species, even though it’s a stone-cold killer

We are murder apes. Sorry, planet-trashing murder apes is what “we” are (1). How frightfully embarrassing.

And yet, you also have to have (2) some sort of compassion for us, so bewildered and capable of lying to ourselves on so many levels. This should not be a surprise, since we are born into lies, we are rewarded for internalising lies and we are punished for seeing the truth, and even more so for speaking it (3).

We are drenched in triviality, in distraction, in narcissism, in wilful ignorance. All day, every day. And the effort to even see that, to say “hey, we are goldfish swimming in water” (4) is more than most of us can bear most of the time (and more than all of us can bear some of the time).

Finally, the point. Check out this atrocity from The Guardian (5)

As per the search bar, the word “movements” is absent. As in, none of the 12 “resolutions” is about joining/creating/maintaining functional social movement organisations. The closest they get to anything about being a citizen is “organise a walk” and “know your reps.” Because that has worked so well these past 35 years.

What would 12 resolutions look like?

1. Join, create, maintain a functional group of people that has an achievable meaningful local goal that will require a mix of actions over a serious period of time
2. Figure out who in the group has what skills, wants which skills
3. Share skills (and knowledge, relationships etc) systematically
4. Refuse to be fobbed off or sucked into meaningless “consultations”
5. Lose the will to live
6. Give up and engage in the Cocker Protocol.
7. Er
8. That’s it.

Footnotes

(1) I know, I know, the word “we” is doing a LOT of work there. And is saying that what passes for “global culture” – in all its containerised, petro-encultured mayhem is somehow a reflection of our “nature” rather than sets of choices by small bands of mostly-white mostly-male greed-and-power heads over a couple of centuries. I may try to “unpack” the we thing another time. But also, fuck nuance; from the perspective of every other species on this planet, it’s kinda irrelevant, no? Splitting hairs and creating distinctions without a difference. Also blah blah megafauna wiped out pre-capitalism by noble savages blah blah.

(2) Bloody Buddhists, forever banging on about compassion.

(3) Yes, I know concepts like “the truth” are hopelessly modernist, naive etc etc. Also, fuck you.

(4) Those Buddhists again –

(5) On one level, sure, of course, what do you expect, it’s The Guardian, as “left” as you are allowed to go. On another level, the fact that this is as good as we can get at a mass media level tells you a lot (all you need to know?) about our collective cognitive capacity.