“Comprehension, in short, means the unpremediated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality – whatever it may be.“
Hannah Arendt
(my approach to writing is discussed in my post about Writing Ethos)
—–
On the news today, I see a few unhappy stories. Three in particular I came across that I thought worth a mention here. One is about the refugee crisis (not a migrant crisis, they are refugees, not migrants), talking about some of the people helping. Refugees on European soil are dying en masse, and there is not support for them from governments or from charities. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that there were violations of the right against inhuman and degrading treatment in refugee camps – and that was a few years ago, before the crisis grew.
(read, for example, <http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/lliana-bird/refugee-crisis-lesbos_b_8388988.html>)
We ought be helping people, not letting them die – is this not the point of being a rich country?
TENS OF THOUSANDS OF HUMAN BEINGS ARE DYING TRYING TO CROSS THE OCEAN, AND CONTINUING TO DIE ONCE THEY ARRIVE BECAUSE WE DO NOT CARE FOR THEM.
(It should be noted that Syria accepted refugees throughout its history, always made space for those who needed it. Yet the world does not return the favour. It should also be noted that the reason that refugees travel in small boats across the ocean to try and reach our shores is because, under European Law, travel companies are heavily penalised for any refugees they allow on board who get denied, and so travel companies do not let anyone travel without a visa. It’s explained at: <http://fee.org/anythingpeaceful/why-are-so-many-refugees-drowning/> ““It is this directive that is the reason for so many refugees drowning in the Mediterranean Sea.”.)
Not to mention our involvement as the west in causing the Syrian refugee crisis: it was known when we went into Iraq that there would be a power vacuum that could be filled by a group like ISIS, and our intervention in Syria in 2012 had the same predictions – that was we threw weapons into a conflict, weapons would end up with extremist groups. Even today, we (we as in “the West”, so mostly the USA) are still giving weapons to Al-Qaeda in Syria, with the reasoning that they are a lesser evil than ISIS – and as before, these weapons will find their way to ISIS. Saudi Arabia, a close ally of our country, is a key backer of ISIS, yet we say nothing to them.
—–
But then there are those who say we should look after our own, before we help others. This may be a defensible position – except that we aren’t looking after our own. For the last few years, social security has been cut. The bedroom tax: if there is an empty room in the house of someone receiving social security payments, they lost money, even though in most cases there was no spare smaller housing to move into. Disabled people are pushed to being classified as ‘fit-to-work’, with documents leaked that show that there were targets set for reducing the number of people receiving disabled social security. Targets set for reduction! For a welfare payment that exists to help people entitled to it… The sanctions regime for people on Job Seeker’s Allowance, where if they miss a meeting or similar they lose four or eight weeks of money – and there are so many stories of people losing money because of an administrative error, letters going missing in the post, going to interviews that the job centre forgot they were attending, and so on. And so we have the United Nations investigating the UK to see if we have violated disabled people’s rights – and when our Prime Minister is questioned, his answer (paraphrased) is “well at least they are better than some places in the world”. Food bank use way up, child poverty increased, homelessness increasing… Yet after taking power, it was announced that there would be 40% more cuts across the board. Here is an article I saw today by a Scottish newspaper about some of the situations, and these are not unusual: <http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13894441>. And here is an article with some examples of how the sanctions regime works: <http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/sixteen-of-the-most-senseless-benefit-sanction-decisions-known-to-man–x1dmkd2_Me>.
Oh, and the Tax Credit Cut. Tax Credits exist because somebody working full-time on the minimum wage does not get enough money to live of, so the Labour government introduced Tax Credits to reduce their tax burden. The Conservatives are removing it – yet still claiming that they wish to reward those who work hard and have a job. Which is demonstrably enough false that it’s most likely a straight lie. (although thankfully the House of Lords narrowly stopped this, it’s still an issue).
(I’ll save further criticism of the government for another time: but it should be noted that there was a vote of no confidence against the conservative party by the teachers’ unions, the fire brigade unions have been striking, NHS has had some strikes, lawyers have been on strike… there isn’t any part of civil society that springs to mind as being happy with the current rule.)
Where is the humanity in any of this? Our “strong economy” is often talked about. We are clearly a rich country… but what’s the point of being a rich country if we don’t use it to help people, including in our own country? Inequality is only growing… We spend money to bail out banks, or when some bombs need dropping in Libya or Syria, but we don’t find money to help people.
—–
The above points were all relatively short-term. So maybe a hundred thousand British people die in poverty, and our future potential is reduced because some children in poverty don’t get educated as well. Maybe a million people from Syria die. There are bigger problems: the human race, as a whole, is destroying the planet. And there is no meaningful attempt to do anything about this.
Climate change is already happening, and we are close to a tipping point – either now in the next couple of years – which means that we increase by enough that even if we all drop dead, it carries on getting worse. (I say ‘it’ because there’s no one simple thing going on). As we get warmer, for example, the oceans can hold less carbon dioxide, so less is absorbed and more is released, meaning there is yet more CO2. As ice melts, methane which is stored in the ice (can’t remember exactly where) is released.
As well as climate change is species extinction. We use dragnets in the oceans, killing five fish (or turtles, dolphins, etc) that we don’t eat for every fish that we eat, and there is huge overfishing of the fish that we do eat. So fish species die, as we take more than they reproduce. And the whole ecosystem collapses – because other fish used to eat those fish, so they die out too, and so on. We are destroying forests and rainforests, somewhere between 30 and 50% have gone in the last century or so.
We somehow have it in our mind, as a species, that everything in the earth is for us, belongs to us, and is for us to use. Nature is no longer viewed as nature, but “natural capital” and “ecosystem services”. So much destruction…
It is in a REALLY BAD WAY. Your mind will protect you from how bad it is, you won’t fully believe it, but it’s really bad. There isn’t just one problem to solve – it isn’t like we just need to reduce fossil fuels or start using less cars – there are a wide range of issues.
And it isn’t even like it’s in a bad way, but it’s being solved; it’s a fight that’s being lost. We are, as a species, ignorant and apathetic to the destruction, and it’s getting worse. In 2002, there was a World Summit on Sustainable Development, and it was pledged to “reduce the rate of biodiversity loss” by 2010: that isn’t even to stop destroying it, but just to destroy less of it. But that was failed – the rate of destruction increased!
In 1992, there was the Kyoto summit, a meeting of all the countries to discuss reducing emissions to deal with climate change. We were meant to reduce our emissions, but instead they grow. The UK still subsidises (ie pays money to reduce the cost of) fossil fuels, but has cut similar subsidies for “green” energy).
(Holding out for some technological change which might save us is mistaken. It is a problem we are causing ourselves, not something already out there to deal with, and it is far easier to reduce the cause than to try and use magic technology to deal with it. A vague belief that “ah, no problem, humans are clever and will invent some stuff” is a form of climate change denial.)
Also a shout out to a film I watched last week: Cowspiracy. It looks into the impact of animal agriculture on emissions (as it happens, animal agriculture is responsible for more pollution than all of fossil fuel burning and transport), and the fact that nobody, not even environmental groups, talk about this. As a society and a species (though only a small amount of the species, the rich “developed” countries, cause it), we have chosen to selfishly indulge our appetite for meat at the cost of the planet. Apart from that statistic that there is more pollution from animal farming sources (between 20-50% per year, depending who measures it and what they measure, but it is always the top), the statistic I found most striking was regarding overpupulation: there are seven billion humans, but sevenTY billion animals kept by humans to eat from. The discussion about overpopulation never mentions this (and is usually doesn’t mention the huge inequalities between the people, with much of the damage done by the rich “developed” societies).
See further this infographic <http://www.cowspiracy.com/infographic/> and watch the film yourself.
It was recently discovered that the oil company Exxon knew about climate change in the 1980s – their scientists found out about it before others did – but not only did they not tell anybody, they actively funded counter-science to cover-up the problem. The media has not been particular active in raising concern and challenging things, though there are some mentions now and again.
To link back to the first section… there were droughts in Syria before fighting started in 2011, which fed into it all kicking off, and the droughts has been linked to climate change. (The science is better developed than we hear, with an ability to link certain events (hurricanes, floods, droughts) to being exacerbated by climate changes.)
As it gets worse – temperature rise and less rainfall in continental Africa I believe is the first issue to matter – there will be more conflict and more “refugee crises”. I think this is the start of a trend, not a one-off. As is currently happening through Turkey and eastern Europe – what can you do when a hundred thousand people start walking to somewhere safer? The Pentagon has done reports into climate change and how it affects security and the increase in conflict, this isn’t just my view.
On the plus side, I guess, seventy years ago was all-out war in Europe, and forty years ago there were fears (and we came close) to nuking everyone, which would have been apocalyptic. So it isn’t too bad…
THERE IS LOADS OF BAD STUFF GOING ON IN THE WORLD AND THE SOCIETY I LIVE IN DOESN’T SEEM TO CARE OR DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT OR EVEN TALK ABOUT IT.
What if, instead of paying loads of money for clever people to work for banks, we tasked them with trying to solve this sort of problem? What if the media was run as a genuine public service, instead of as a business? It doesn’t have to be the way it is, it is far from inevitable. It is more like a choice we have chosen not to make. Admittedly, it is far from easy to make this choice – most people aren’t aware of what’s going on (ignorance is bliss, plus it’s not like the media keep us well informed of it all), and there is a huge entrenched power with vested interests – but as a society, this is the choice that has been made.
—–
So… in this backdrop of terrible stuff going on, I find myself with some despair. Big problems in the world, and as an individual I feel powerless. It’s a bit tricky to find much meaning in the normal life, in what society tells you to do (study well, get a good job, have a family, don’t worry about these issues because they stop you being happy), knowing this is going on. Hence despair.
—–
There is much more I could talk about here, which add to the list of big issues. I decided to stick with these few as I read about them today. But further problems include American military dominance in the world; the loss of individual privacy against governments who want to surveil everything that happens (Snowden et cetera); neoliberal capitalist economic policy being dominant across the whole world, coming up against and beating democracy in Greece and Portugal; apartheid and atrocities against the Palestinian people by Israel; a narrative of “terrorism” fears in the West that are misguided and lead us along the path to fascism and totalitarianism… Yep. Despair.