The Plan: part 2
706.
Well that was embarrassing - for Facebook. I originally used Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus.’ Facebook removed it for nudity and nipples. Yes, I know. So here’s a nice photo of a green shoot.
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I’d better be honest here. I don’t have much of a plan. I do know that the first thing to do is to get out of our blue funk and maybe admit that we’re not all dead yet, maybe not even doomed yet.
Yes, I know, that’s a bit bold. How dare we think we’re not quite doomed? Look at the weather, look at the graphs, look at the wildfires in Los Angeles... The temperatures are going up and we’re scared about what’s going to happen next year, in five years, in ten years.
The crucial bit is we don’t know what’s going to happen and we don’t know when and we hate that.
Part of the problem I think is that we’ve got used to having predictions about the future and we only remember the ones that came true. We forget the ones that didn’t.
Remember the stock picker who predicted twenty of the last two financial crashes?
Now I’m not great at this amount of optimism because I have a terrible tendency to catastrophise as well. I come from a family with an optimistic father and a catastrophising worry-addicted mother.
She had an excuse in the form of untreated PTSD from WWII – she was born in 1933 in Hungary and by the time she was 14 had witnessed bombing (by the Americans), 3-day old battlefields, dead soldiers, looting Russian soldiers, hyperinflation and had been taken to Switzerland. She then crossed Europe by herself and ended up in Wales and then England, before her parents miraculously escaped from behind the Iron Curtain to join her in England as refugees.
Unlike many many people, she survived – but was endlessly alert to some new disaster. She was also extremely tough though she looked elegant and fragile. Worrying was her hobby.
Now worrying is basically endless repeated planning for the worst future: what if there’s a hurricane and the roof comes off? What if there’s a flood? What if there’s a fire? What if the soldiers come and take us away? What if I die?
It’s the most wearing thing you can do, I think. Worrying about anything is exhausting and makes you old.
Personally, when the worry-cloud descends on me – generally at 3 in the morning – I try to think what can I do now to head off the catastrophe?
At 3 in the morning the answer is usually nothing. Even the next day the answer is usually not much. I can check the local flood plan. I don’t see Trump invading the UK any time. There’s quite a lot of land between us and the Russians, even more between us and the Chinese and if the world goes nuclear, we’re all dead anyway.
So I’m afraid that the answer is yet more optimism, of the learned kind. Simply because that’s the more pleasant world to live in.
Yes, the weather’s horrible, but at least it’s temporary. Maybe the sun will come out tomorrow?
Life is unfair but maybe we can make it fairer by doing x?
The thing is, as long as we’re sitting at home, doom-scrolling and writing articles about how we’re all finished, we won’t be taking action. We won’t be doing anything. This is what the oligarchs want us to do: nothing. Then they can have a clear field to ruin the planet in their desperate childish pursuit of more cash, more stuff, more fame.
What actual action can we take? If I’m honest, I don’t really know – but I do know that we have to disrupt the oligarchs and make life difficult for all their enablers in politics too (yes, Sir Kier, I’m looking at you. I don’t expect much from the Tories, but I do expect better from you.)
We have to remember that a protest march, in the ultimate analysis, is a threatened riot. Nobody has to riot – though I notice that the far-right fascists don’t worry about that. But the threat has to be there.
Otherwise you’ll find that the politicians and the media ignore the protest marchers, no matter how pretty the dancing and the costumes.
Earth Herself is helping us by showing us how fast things can get worse; she’s screaming for help with her hurricanes and wildfires and floods and droughts. The Arctic is melting, she’s telling us, do you really want the Gulf Stream to stop or go south so the UK freezes in the winter like Maine? Really?
In the long run, of course, we’re all dead. Pessimists have to face the end of themselves. Optimists can think of going to heaven if that way inclined, or even just their carbon and nitrogen and oxygen atoms going back into the soil for the trees to use for growing.
I watch the herring gulls rejoice as they glide over us on the wind and I think, maybe next time round I’ll be a gull and I’ll be able to fly!
Always remember how boring it would be if we knew what will happen next.
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