This essay is just three years old and already proven more prescient
What If We Stopped Pretending by Jonathan Franzen
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending
The celebrated writer addresses the oncoming climate apocalypse by looking into the most likely scenarios we choose to look past and says more action might take place if we stopped our delusions.
When he gets to what would need to happen to roll back disaster most, he wrote:
"Finally, overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting. They must accept the reality of climate change and have faith in the extreme measures taken to combat it. They can’t dismiss news they dislike as fake. They have to set aside nationalism and class and racial resentments. They have to make sacrifices for distant threatened nations and distant future generations."
The 16 months following the essay's publication then illustrated how unlikely such events would be. 2020 showed our ugly nature.
Then Franzen wrote:
"In times of increasing chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and armed force, rather than in the rule of law, and our best defense against this kind of dystopia is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal systems, functioning communities. In this respect, any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action. Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme wealth inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, ridding the country of assault weapons—these are all meaningful climate actions."
To me, the author merely sounds clear-eyed.
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