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Hank Stone One Page Perspective
People ask why we can’t take just 10% of the U.S. military budget, and spend it instead on social needs, like transitioning away from fossil fuels to protect the climate. After all, the U.S. spends about $1 trillion every year on “defense.” Why not defend the livability of our planet?
For that matter, why not feed the hungry, have single-payer healthcare, eliminate poverty, build efficient housing, negotiate world peace, and “build Heaven on Earth?”
The reason is that we live in a system with surprisingly robust mechanisms for keeping things as they are. Our whole military-economic-political-industrial-agricultural-educational-social-media-religious way of life protects itself from change. Giving up our way of life is literally unthinkable. This is so not just for powerful decision makers, but also for us ordinary people.
Yet this same way of life cannot be sustained. Our world is overpopulated; threatened by wars and nuclear weapons, with runaway global warming, tied to economics that despoil nature and poor people; and undemocratically governed by the rich. Our governments commit genocide, and double down on fossil fuel infrastructure. Our politics has become chaotic and nasty.
Greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, leading to record high temperatures, droughts, forest fires, floods, and ever-rising sea levels. These are warnings!
So far, our society has been able to ignore these problems, and “stay the course.” But the failures will keep coming, and keep getting worse. That is what “unsustainable” means. As resistant to change as it is, the status quo cannot and will not continue.
Hurricanes Katrina, Andrew and Sandy weren’t enough. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza weren’t enough. 300+ school shootings in 2023 weren’t enough. News of the imminent failure of the Gulf Stream was not enough. Record heat waves weren’t enough. More and more devastating failures will continue to occur. Again, that is what unsustainable means.
Our way of life will end. Some combination of assaults will cause it to break down, and its end may be sudden and devastating. The breakdown will outrage and inconvenience ordinary people enough to bring them out of their houses banging pots and pans, in widespread general strikes. Elected officials and business leaders unable to change will be swept aside.
But the end of our way of life does not have to be the end of life. A lot of honorable and wise people have figured out things to do to save human civilization, and to give humankind a good chance at a successful and long-term future. Solutions include training in kindness and conflict resolution, actual human rights, and enforceable world laws against conspiracy to commit war. Unthinkable, certainly. But unreasonable?
Ideally, new leaders will rise up, prepared to do the legitimate business of the people—all the people. These new leaders are now dismissed as dreamers, and systematically being marginalized. But change we now consider impossible will suddenly become obviously necessary, and may happen with stunning speed.
Let us think the unthinkable, and prepare ourselves for the future we need.
[January 17, 2024 Hank Stone hstone@rochester.rr.com
One Page Perspective #70]
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