Storms intensify in the Middle East. Droughts in the American Midwest, California, around the globe. More frequent and stronger hurricanes. Flooding. Extremes growing more extreme.
“This will be greater than anything we have ever seen in the past. This will be unprecedented. Every living thing will be affected,” Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy in the US and professor at Texas Tech University, said in an interview with The Guardian (June 1).
A blackbird pecks at the bird feeder in the yard. A buzzard circles overhead. Three deer eat from the low-hanging limbs of a juniper outside our window. Trees die of fungus and rot. A fox, lost amid suburban sprawl, tears at trash bags for food.
“The cause of the world’s woe is birth, the cure of the world’s woe is a bent stick,” Jack Kerouac writes. A koan? A prod?
We live in this world, are part of it. Perhaps, as the scientist in “On The Beach” says, the world can live without us. “It’s not the end of the world at all. It’s only the end of us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan’t be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.”
The Great Salt Lake has “shrunk by two-thirds, continues to dry up,” and the “air surrounding Salt Lake City would occasionally turn poisonous.” A “potential environmental nuclear bomb,” says a Utah lawmaker tells the New York Times (June 7).
A documentary shows the movement of population, from South to North, from Africa, South and Central America, the Middle East, to the United States, Europe. Men, women crossing dangerous waters. Fleeing war. Fleeing disaster. Fleeing broken economies and gang violence, gangs that claim control over resources, that function as extra-legal governments, entire populations in forced migration.
Historic movements. Okies escaping dust storms, Mexicans tromping up and down the West Coast, road-weary, barely holding on. Kerouac called them the Fellaheen, romanticized their lives, but there is nothing romantic about poverty and the flight from fear or hunger.
There are men in the woods, in the vast suburbs that are New Jersey. A man living under a train overpass in New Brunswick. Rousted regularly, but he returns. And returns again, full bed roll, bags and rucksacks of clothing. I talked to a kid at the rail station. He was bumming cash. Needed a meal. I heard he died, maybe from COVID. Maybe something else. He lived on the street, in the elements. Like the Mexican in the tent camp in Lakewood. Dead from winter freeze, from carbon monoxide from a faulty heater. From being internally displaced, by capital, by no-work, by drugs, or drink, or the impending frost.
I talk to these men, these women, outcasts who lack the romance of the mythical hobo of Depression Era tales, of Woody Guthrie, of Kerouac. These men and women are not ghosts, not specters of some mythical night. They are refugees from an American and global economy. Economic effluent. The despised.
This is what American exceptionalism looks like, what Western exceptionalism looks like, what the machine does. What it reaps.
Sartre says every man bears responsibility for all of mankind. We are both the man begging on the street and the one who put him there, because we are free to decide and act, and to not act. And by not acting, by passing by, we choose the outcome, not endorse it so much as make it our own. We assign monetary value to all in our view, to the air and water and rocks and people, turn our globe into product to be expended, turn man into beggars.
“To make myself passive in the world, to refuse to act upon things and upon Others is still to choose myself,” Sartre writes. I may not choose war, or pollution, or capitalism, but “For lack of getting out it, I have chosen it.” The lack of choice is choice, whether “due to inertia, to cowardice in the face of public opinion, or because I prefer certain other values.”
We see it the destruction, live it. Disease and death. A lingering virus that has killed more than 6.2 million around the world, a million here. That will sicken more and kill more before it is through. Russian nukes and a war in Ukraine. Wildfires. Tsunamis. Lingering radiation from nuclear accidents. Atmospheric carbon magnifying heat, warming the seas, the planet. The threat spreading.
I reread “On The Beach,” a book I first read in the early 1970s in sixth grade, a story of the aftermath of nuclear war, of radiation spreading south, washing across the last habitable spaces on Earth. I remember air raid sirens. I’m seeing the parallels. Reliving the fear, the embedded angst. A climate disaster. Nuclear destruction.
“The ‘delicate balance of terror’ that characterized nuclear strategy during the Cold War has not disappeared,” but instead has been “reconfigured,” writes John W. Dower. The “wherewithal to destroy the earth as we know it many times over” remains a feature of modern life.
“The future use of nuclear weapons, whether by deliberate decision or by accident, remains an ominous possibility.”
We have learned nothing. We are fooling ourselves. We live in willful ignorance.
COVID mutates and spreads. Continues its march around the globe. Fires ravages a drought-dry Southwest. Shortages pockmark the economy.
A police chief on TV details another shooting. Politicians offer “thoughts and prayers.” A teacher on the news, tells how he tried to protect his students. Kids told to hide under desks. To pretend they were asleep. Didn’t matter. We’ve seen this before. We will see it again.
Hank Kalet is a poet, essayist, and journalist. He teaches at Rutgers University. This is part of a longer work in progress. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Substack: hankkalet.Substack.com
From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2022
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