I recall with some relish a comment I read on the Seattle subreddit a while back. The commenter was furious at how all of the recent transplants were screwing up their previously wonderful city. Eventually, they happened to mention that they themselves had moved to Seattle from California less than a year prior.
There is a real thing going on in the US today, a sort of inchoate rage felt at all of the poorly defined "others". My hunch is that much of it stems from the rising anxieties of climate change, economic inequality, corporate political control, and even more recently the pandemic. Everyone needs to feel they have a certain level of agency and control in the world. It's hard to sleep at night if you don't even feel certain that your bed will still be there when you wake up.
The world today often feels like we are ants surrounded by lumbering billionaire and corporate giants, hoping not to get stepped on while we watch climate change slowly dissolve the ground beneath us. People naturally cling to any remaining pieces of agency they can find, and lash out when even that tiny inch is taken from them. So when I see people screaming at a waitress for insisting they put on a mask, or sneering at someone visiting their beloved hiking trail, I wonder if it's only because there is no convenient face they can yell at for all of the larger forces that have actually marginalized them.
> There is a real thing going on in the US today, a sort of inchoate rage felt at all of the poorly defined "others". My hunch is that much of it stems from the rising anxieties of climate change, economic inequality, corporate political control, and even more recently the pandemic.
I have this feeling from time to time. I find that it magically disappears when I stop consuming media. I'm not saying "it goes away when I ignore it", either. I do not get the same sense of an "angry society" when I interact with other human beings, and rarely hear anyone express any kind of urgent anxiety about climate change or economic inequality.
We face serious issues, sure, but none are the urgent societal threats they're made out to be. The real danger are the anxiety peddlers and the fear-amplifiers among us, who want to influence and then monetize your emotional state, or to transmute it into political capital.
And this is what frustrates me so much about recent attempts at social justice activism. It’s like we find the only thing we can see on the surface and start screaming at it while the rot in the core goes unaddressed. I resist the screaming because I want to fix problems in the core. But the screaming, while not entirely unjustified, often just serves to further obfuscate and conceal the rot within. It’s hard not to feel hopeless when you see so much human capital spent fighting the symptoms.
Part of the mismatch between your interests and the others mentioned here is that your interests are long term and flexible and theirs are short and inflexible. They need to pay this months bills, and at the same time, I suspect they see their current lifestyle and job security at risk. Long term climate change isn't where they focus.
This is why all solutions to climate change also have to address shorter term worries if the political tide has any chance of getting buy-in from those with global AND those with local concerns. Problem is, both the voters and our political leaders have ignored BOTH kinds of problems (and at least one perspective) for far too long. Now both interests have become entrenched into dissonant encampments that, stupidly, are unwilling to talk about how we could take steps to address both purposes at the same time.
This sounds a lot like the US's recent social war over unshared political priorities, and I think it is. The 1%, the middle class, and the dispossessed all have different needs and interests that can't be met if we all feel free to overlook the perspective of those who don't share our priorities. Those experiencing local displacement due to the arrival of well-heeled haves aren't wrong. Nor will today's haves be wrong one day should they find their world turned upside down and then express their unhappiness when others show them no pity, which is likely if they live long enough.
The solution, I think, is to not dismiss dispossession. It's to acknowledge it and start an earnest discussion about what can be done about it.
There is a real thing going on in the US today, a sort of inchoate rage felt at all of the poorly defined "others". My hunch is that much of it stems from the rising anxieties of climate change, economic inequality, corporate political control, and even more recently the pandemic. Everyone needs to feel they have a certain level of agency and control in the world. It's hard to sleep at night if you don't even feel certain that your bed will still be there when you wake up.
The world today often feels like we are ants surrounded by lumbering billionaire and corporate giants, hoping not to get stepped on while we watch climate change slowly dissolve the ground beneath us. People naturally cling to any remaining pieces of agency they can find, and lash out when even that tiny inch is taken from them. So when I see people screaming at a waitress for insisting they put on a mask, or sneering at someone visiting their beloved hiking trail, I wonder if it's only because there is no convenient face they can yell at for all of the larger forces that have actually marginalized them.