Against Politics

One of the ever-present quotes that perpetually circles my brain about politics comes from Douglas Adams. (Never mind that I could have sworn until yesterday that it was from the like-humoured Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain.):

It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it... anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

Beautiful. Simple. Positive in its own truth. Completely what I believe and daily what is confirmed in my observation of politics. But how can we respond to these people who, fundamentally, are not right for the jobs they hold, and are generally infuriating to boot? Banging on about the ridiculousness of politicians is so exhausting. So trite. So so done. Old. Useless. 

And yet, so necessary in order to keep one sane. Momentarily. 

But instead of using this forum to complain, say, about the ridiculousness of one Eric Pickles, “Conservative”* MP and Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government making tired, awful jokes when communities and local governments are struggling to help the thousands of people whose homes are being flooded, I will let the Mirror to it to be insulting and try to be more positive. And a bit more radical. Because something has to shift. There’s actually no choice anymore, as far as I can tell. 

Why? Because negativity begets further negativity and the isolated island where our parliamentarians daily try to re-create Lord of the Flies is negative enough. And they create no real change or any tenable solutions—nothing meaningful anyway. Changing the arrangement of suffering and burying our communal heads in the sand shouldn't be commended. And we need solutions much faster than any of us are enabled to imagine in the current ‘political climate’.

Douglas Adams would have been an excellent prime minister or president. Creative. Committed. Passionate. Wise.  Humble. Never mind that he was British so instantly excluded because of the oddly xenophobic law that one must be born in the United States to be president. No, the politicians on either side of the Atlantic may differ slightly in tone and constituency, but they both fall directly in the cross hairs of Adams’s quote. Their very wish to be a part of that particular system shows, above all else, a fundamental lack of creativity.

And I suppose that is what I lament the most about politics and those who think and write about it. It is all in this insulated, reverberating vacuum that acts as if it is all nothing into nothing. People doing what they do, whether it is receive lobbyist funds or blow jobs from interns, or make decisions that are only predicated on the circumstances of the next x number of years until the next election. 

This would all be fine and good, and I could just leave it to be the cesspool that it is perpetually if politics wasn't deciding the very fate of all of us.

The most overt, urgent issue is—in my mind—the environment. When I speak of the ‘the environment’, I don’t mean that irritatingly patronising and sexist rhetoric that refers to ‘Mother Earth’. The fact is that our good old Gaia is as cruel as she is kind as is any other part of nature. The fact is that the Earth will most likely survive whatever ridiculousness humans dream up—short of some sort of Death Star; it is the humans that will not. The fact is, if we continue down the same road at the same pace we have done over the last three hundred years or so, Mother Earth will have the merest task of digesting all the toxicity we dreamed up in the name of progress and farting it out the other side like a bad meal. Humans, and most likely most other ‘higher’ orders of life won’t survive it though, and she’ll be back to the primordial ooze drawing board, ready to re-create another experiment in evolution.

The ‘environment’ will flex and continue to exist. We will not.

And the people in charge of our collective purse and at the helm of our collective action, what are they doing about all this?

Nothing.** Ok, to be generous, very, very little. And most times they’d like to re-negotiate that as soon as the fleeting passion about the environment has waned and proven too expensive.  And we are talking about only a few, narrow solutions.

You get a bunch of creative people—and I mean properly creative people, like five year olds and hermits living off the grid—in a room (if the hermits agree and don’t smell too awful to the five-year-olds) and you give them a problem. They will come up with something. It may smack a bit of “If you strap it to a dinosaur’s back…” or “Using the bio-mass of our collective excrement…”, but you’ll have something.

The people in charge won’t even consent to consider that there is a problem. They need numbers and absolute evidence. Hard and fast and confirmed without a shadow of a doubt as insurance for taking any political responsibility. Mind that waiting for such evidence may be a very long wait.  Conclusive evidence for a planet’s worth of ecosystems, effects and causes will be difficult.  Possibly impossible.  I might argue that waiting on such evidence might be too late.

The evidence I consider daily is that we live in a culture that governs itself on the laws of the land. Right now, the laws of the land say that one can choose to burn rich resources, creating toxic output in our common, finite atmosphere and kicking off dozens of other life-extinguishing processes on the micro and macro levels. We live in a society that, merely for convenience, we can insert our children’s excrement in toxic casings to be dealt with at a later date. Yet to be determined. Never mind that it will be those children or perhaps their children who will be sidled with the satisfying vocation of dealing with that in order to survive.  Hopefully not by hand. And this is not to mention the floating continent of plastic debris we have in our oceans. And this is not to mention the shifting Ph of the oceans toward a point where my children’s children may never be able to eat fish from the sea because there won’t be any fish in the sea. And this is not to mention the floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and that arrive with surprising scale and frequency.

I just feel more responsibility for the future than our politicians apparently do.

So, let’s agree to disagree. I don’t need anyone to agree that there is climate change, human induced or natural just like I don’t need a person to agree that evolution exists in order to agree that elephants needn’t be massacred for their tusks.

All I need for us to agree to is that this waste has got to stop. Foremost, the waste of our collective natural resources and collective ability to survive and thrive on Earth. But also this waste of time and this waste of space that is silly political infighting when we all need to be considering how to do things fundamentally different, hopefully subtly to start but increasingly differently so that the thoughtless conveniences of today—be they disposable nappies or combustion engines—don’t inevitably result in our children not being able to eat, drink clean water or stay alive. Simple as.

And we need really creative thinkers to help.

The dismal picture I have painted of the present disasters inevitably increasing and growing in severity and scale and frequency, leaving us smaller and smaller islands of privilege and safety for refuge, may seem to smack of pessimism.  Of finite possibility. Of a severe lack of abundance in thinking.

But our abundance is actually in the people around us.  They are not just there to clog up our streets and the air and cause problems and inevitably result in lesser and lesser value placed on individual human lives.  Every human is capable of coming up with a possibility for a solution.  One part of it, or a significant portion.  Something that can help more of us survive.  Or thrive.  Or live peaceably. Maybe we need a million solutions.  That is ok; we have billions of possibilities.

So, the likes of Douglas Adams will most likely never consider public office. The truly creative, intelligent and willing to have a sense of humour will also be wisely humble and never engage in the enormous ego project that is a run for public office, particularly a public office that holds any notable power.  Let’s not do that then.

Take those notions and find them a means.  A forum.  An expert. Collaborators. Mentors.  Teachers.  Study something.  Figure out if it possible.  Past school age?  Contact a university. Go online.  Try to start a trend in doing things differently. Show it isn’t so hard. Put it out there. Write. Converse. Ask. Do tell.

And if you don’t have a big engineering idea about harnessing the power of the elements, think just a second longer about the indulgences and conveniences that have very real costs, even if not immediate. If you benefit, there is the very real possibility your children, their children or their grandchildren will have to sort it later. And that’s not fair.

I call on all those who have an idea, whether it is how to sort out raised water levels or how to power vehicles with water and splitting atoms, to figure out a way to do your thing.  This is my thing: a call to action.  An impassioned plea.

I’ve done my bit (and will hopefully keep doing it), so do yours.

*I use the word conservative with quotation marks here because I have yet to witness a so-called conservative conserve anything apart from their own personal wealth and the wealth of their friends.  Not the environment.  Not our national resources, whatever they may be. Not money. Just like Labour doesn’t know what it means to do real work and the Liberals are far from left-leaning anymore, it seems more like a parliament of misnomers than representatives. Did I say that I was trying to be less negative?  Well, witness my very concerted effort.

**I wrote this Saturday.  While editing on Sunday, a news blurb, nearly a blip came up that Ed Miliband had made a pronouncement that the flooding was a sign of environmental changes.  And we are “kicking the can down the road” (a phrase that politicians are fond of and use for many different things, which inevitably deflates it of any power it might have had) about environmental issues.  It is Monday and I haven’t heard/read/seen another peep about it.  Is it a proportional or appropriate political response to our environmental reality? It seems not. Not on any level. It’s just another politician in wellies.