Hurricane Helene
I had a post planned for today about social media literacy, but the news from the Gulf Coast and Appalachia is considerably more important than anything I had to offer. One of the goals of this newsletter is to encourage people to think about how interconnected our present is to the past, and how systemic and institutional influences impact our personal connections with one another and the world around us. Hurricane Helene is no exception.
We are, in some ways, expected to become numb to images of coastal communities ravaged by winds, rains, and hurricanes. We shouldn’t, but our society normalizes it.
While we are doing what we can to fight the impulse of normalization, we also need to draw attention to what is happening in Appalachia. Our fellow people there need help. And their devastation is a portent of what is coming for people everywhere if we do not get climate change under control and don’t invest in environmental justice more broadly.
Inland towns and cities, the places where people on the coasts seek refuge from hurricanes, have been devastated, if not washed off the map by a hurricane. An interstate crumbled ahead of still-moving cars and trucks that tumbled into an inescapable void, where seconds before there had been rebar and pavement. Houses floated away with people in them and on them, swept away to succumb to the flood waters. Entire communities are gone.
Nowhere is safe from the caprices of weather anymore. This is our world on climate change.
And it doesn’t have to be this way.
We had proof in 2020 that reduced travel and carbon footprints can work. And instead of embracing that knowledge and applying it, the majority of people caved as corporations insisted on a return to “normal” that was actively more terrible in every way. And worse yet, people embraced everyone and their mother’s AGI and LLMs as cheap entertainment and labor-saving tools, even with the knowledge that the environmental impacts would be catastrophic.
Governments all over the country (and the world) threw their weight behind all of this too. Tax incentives. Government contracts. And they defunded essential public services to hire even more cops and raze trees to the ground to build training facilities for those cops to learn how to use military equipment and militarized drones against their own people like an occupying force.
Where was the assertiveness? The fight? The popular push to unionize workplaces and go on strike? The overwhelming demonstrations against cop cities popping up all over the country?
The people who tried to warn us about these problems at every step of the way, and tried to organize and mobilize were not just ignored. They were maligned. Scapegoated. Marginalized. Hell, some of them have been killed.
If dangling materially better working and living conditions before us only to snatch them away isn’t enough to cut through the propaganda and call folks to action, what will it take?
There are solutions to this and so many of our society’s ills—real solutions!—and they don’t look like what corporate interests and shareholders will find acceptable. We won’t get close enough to implementing them unless we actually DO something.
If not for the people of New Orleans and Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands and the Gulf and Appalachia, do it for yourselves.
Nowhere is safe. And we can do better.