This year I am going to write something short, daily, about what is going on – “2 cents on the Arrived Ecological Debacle” (2cotAED). I have to write it; you don’t have to read it. If you DO read it, feel free to tell me how wrong I am (and hopefully why). Re: the debacle aspect: in 2004 the English writer Sara Maitland wrote about the “pending ecological debacle.” The expression stuck with me; it’s a debacle because it was foreseen, warned about and was avoidable. Well, it’s no longer really “pending” is it?
I found this on some Facebook (I dip in occasionally) advert for a self-help app.
It’s cute, and reminds me of the LBJ line that “a mistake isn’t a mistake until you refuse to learn from it.”
But the thing is this. As per Jimmy Baldwin “not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” It requires both emotional and cognitive courage and social structures to be able to say “we have made a mistake. We need to look at this differently, (and come up with different measures of success and failure.)” (1)
And as the catastrophes pile up at our feet, calling themselves progress (yes, Benjamin on Klee), as the cartoonists have to quit, it becomes harder and harder to even have that “sideways perspective” (2) that lets you see the whole die, at a social level. Individuals see it, but fear they are the only one who does (the spiral of silence), and don’t know what to do with the perspective anyhow, in the absence of civil society that has the capacity to restrain the state-corporate nexus. And many, I guess, teach themselves how not to see it anymore, because honestly, what’s the point?
Footnote
(1) I saw a meme recently along the lines of “we should measure economic success not by how much richer the 1% is getting, but how the bottom 30% is faring at the supermarket.” Seems legit…
(2) the 2 dimension-3 dimension thing here is also reminiscent of Flatland.
marchudson.net 
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