Tuning Out

The 2018 election season marked a high-water point for my political engagement. We supported ten Democrats identified by Mind the Gap running for winnable seats and were thrilled when seven won, the House flipped and Trump’s government takeover was slowed down. Then came 2020, when we expected a Blue Wave in revulsion to Trump’s disastrous presidency. Mind the Gap shifted its emphasis to get-out-the-vote campaigns and away from individual races, which gave me fewer contests to cheer personally. A women’s group in Santa Barbara stepped in with in-person fundraisers for Senate hopefuls who were all personally exciting: Mark Kelly (Arizona), Sara Gideon (Maine), Teresa Greenfield (Iowa), Cal Cunningham (NC), and I adopted Al Gross (AK), as we hoped to flip the Senate. Alas, except for Kelly, all our candidates, plus the well-funded Jamie Harrison in SC, flopped. Yes, Joe Biden won, but by a razor-thin margin in the Electoral College, and Trump still garnered so many millions of votes that he continues to claim victory to this day. Did the more than 74 million Americans who voted for Trump not see the corruption, the incompetence, the narcissism, the cruelty, the efforts to divide the country, the damage to the environment and our standing in the world that had been on full display?

As we roll into the 2022 election season, which I dread, I hear the same requests for money for House races, Senate races, get-out-the-vote campaigns, and I tune out. It’s not just that I think my money is not needed or wasted, although the 2020 elections in SC and ME point in that direction. The issue, it seems to me, is a more fundamental one. To put it bluntly, our country has become dysfunctional to the point of being ungovernable by either party, and the world has entered a doom loop with no exit strategy in sight (1). The current schisms over abortion and gun rights are exacerbated by the Supreme Court rulings but are symptomatic of what seems an unbridgeable divide between Blue and Red states. No one is trying for a compromise; each side wants to win. The two sides of the country are operating from two divergent set of facts. In fact, the only thing that the politicians of both parties can agree on is a flawed, destructive foreign policy: spend obscene amounts on defense, fight Russia, threaten China and support Israel.

The rest of the world is doing no better. The front section of the New York Times is, day in and day out, a downer. Autocrats are rising, poverty is growing, minorities suppressed, corruption omnipresent. The dominant forces are working to get rich and/or obtain power, not to do good. Which all brings me to the threat of climate change. In decades and centuries past, the human experiment has demonstrated just as many problematic tendencies, if not more. Think of World War I, World War II, the Civil War, Europe’s history of endless wars. Yellow journalism has been as bad, I suppose, as Fox News. Racism and anti-semitism were sanctioned. It’s hard to think of a period in history when people and governments got things right. So it may be naive to have expected, as I certainly did in the past, that human progress was marching in a good direction. We can easily say that, as bad as things now are, they have been as bad, and often worse, in the past–and we have survived. The problem is that we didn’t have to deal with climate change in the past (although our past actions have led to the current crisis) and this crisis, unlike everything else, is existential.

It’s good that we’re switching, too slowly, to electric cars and cutting down, again too slowly, on plastics and trying to clean our waterways and oceans. The forces already set in motion, the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, mean that it is too late to stop glaciers melting, the sea rising, droughts, wildfires, floods devastating communities, and animals and plants becoming extinct by the millions. All the metrics that we feared by 2050 are now due in 2030. How will the world cope with the coming disruptions: mass starvation, unchecked immigration, environmental destruction. By coming together to find solutions? Or by erecting walls so the “haves” can preserve what they have left, at the expense of the “have-nots”– the Africans, the Pacific Islanders, the masses on the Indian subcontinent, not to overlook poor Blacks in Alabama. The appalling rise in income inequality in our country is a clue to the answer. Not to give him too much importance, but Joe Manchin is the poster boy for the situation. Faced with the choice, and in a unique position, to do something good for the entire country or make more money for already wealthy industrialists in his state, he goes for the latter.

Or look at the Amazon rain forest. A small number of individuals can make money by cutting it down, or the planet can be helped by leaving it intact. It gets cut down. On issue after issue, the individual’s desire, or need, to materially improve his life trumps humanity’s need for a better civilization or safer and more secure planet. Look at voters in this country. Abortion rights? – I’m not pregnant. Gun control? – No one’s shooting me. Climate change? – I’ve got air-conditioning. But the price of gas at the pump – that bothers me, so I’ll vote for the other guy. Maybe when faced with extinction or a return of the Dark Ages, China will say, enough of these competing nation states and enough of wealth accumulation, the world must be ruled by one entity for the benefit, and survival, of what’s left. A benevolent dictatorship is the best we can hope for. How else do we get to John Lennon’s “Imagine”?

So, I am tuning out. If the people of Texas want to live in that society, with their rules on abortion, guns, voting, industrial pollution, how can I fight it? If the Philippines want to elect another Marcos as president, why should I care? These are not my fights

_________
(1) I’m not alone in this thought. The head of Unite America has said, “Our political system is caught in a “doom loop” of partisanship and polarization, as both major parties trade long-term institutional stability for short-term political gain in what they rationalize as a fight for the soul of our country.”