Much of our present turmoil will be resolved by new-found solidarity among humanity.
The frayed strands of divided peoples must be found and gathered, and both technology and better access to good intentions, innovations, and insights will help us in this crucial process to weave a much more flexible social fabric.
People are waking up all over the world. Given the COVID-19 revelations of broken social infrastructure and inequity, people are uniting against racism, sexism, profiteering, and broken governments.
Governments, are reacting just as historians have always predicted: desperate attempts at strong man tactics in Brazil, Hungary, the Philippines, and of course, often in the USA, to name just a few.
Today we have the internet, social media, and a rising tide of voices to take on these many daunting tasks. But it won’t be easy. Like all meaningful work, stitching a broken world back together is hard.
In many ways the perfect storm of the latest pandemic surged into being because widespread denial of vulnerabilities was rampant. Not just our ill-prepared places with PPE shortages and no robust social and health preparedness, but far beyond that.
Systemic racism is revealed. Many economists and social observers also have realized that you can’t tie employment to healthcare insurance and expect plague will be covered. You can’t dismantle and deregulate toxic emissions and expect a respiratory illness will not be affected. Likewise, if you disregard the needs and suffering of refugees and migrants, they don’t evaporate at the border. They become victims at super spreader sites of a virus that is an equal opportunity plague.
Also, the idea that enforcing “law and order” at gunpoint, or with tear gas canisters, won’t work for long. Reluctant, militarized agents are sworn to protect and serve, and most wish to remain heroes. Yet, they are being forced to “dominate the space” with heavy weaponry amid overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrators.
Racism’s time is up.
Racism’s days are numbered.
Those who still wish to employ it, are doing so now, primarily as a tool for campaigning. Note that less and less is it acceptable as a systemic policy once bolstered by a clear, supremacist majority.
Recent unrest in Portland, Oregon, where I spend last weekend, displays that vastly different groups can come together for anti-racism: veterans, unions, nurses, moms in yellow, dads with leaf-blowers, LGBTQ peoples, farmers, and many, many more.
Sexism’s time is up.
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made an eloquent speech decrying the constant and everyday reality of disrespecting women, she touched every heart who sees the truth in this. Not just men with wives, daughters, or sisters are being asked to care. People who care about human decency are called to care, and females are grateful to those men.
We also have the downfall of predators such a Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. Although credible stories by women accusing men are still ignored, this will not stand the test of time and open air.
In that open air, open voices, long suppressed, are finally opening hearts and minds.
Exploitation of Earth, your time is nearly up.
Greta Thunberg recently spoke of how the science to address pandemic and to address our rapidly heating climate can no longer be ignored, and are, in fact linked. More people are awake. Predictions of 2050 extinctions, the costs to poorest people, and uninhabitable regions are now openly discussed. Whereas just two years ago they were not front-page news every single day.
And, of course, it’s not just racism, sexism, or novel, glaring climate concerns that people are recognizing, but all the consequential outcomes that they bring. Think of migration, civil unrest, and the social costs of Hurricane Maria, or Detroit water quality, or the many pollution deaths and disabilities that women, children and all people of all colors, face. It is well publicized, now, for example, that dirty air will exacerbate the effects of ALL respiratory illness, including COVID-19, and the next nasty bug we unleash if we don’t mend our ways.
Food as revolution
Food is an entirely relatable commodity. More people than ever before are now awake to the fact that our new waves of pandemics come directly from our relationship to habitats, animals, domestic agriculture and exploitation of both workers and eco-systems.
It is not just a few exploited bats, pangolins, or orangutans that affect our food intake with bad effects. It is our overwhelmingly accepted agricultural procedures — such as soil depleting herbicides and pesticides and chemicals — that have up until now been useful to feed more people.
Beef, for example, like oil, is heavily subsidized by tax payer dollars. Slaughter house and meat plant workers are not safe, nor compensated fairly. The animals themselves are disregarded as mute non-sentient beings. Many, many exploited people know the danger of such disregard as it relates to caste.
As people realize how our present foodways lead, not only to pandemic, but are also unsustainable to protect our own species, they amend eating habits.
Even clearing city-center streets of cars will affect all new open air, socially distanced cafes, and parking garages morphed into community garden spots.
The man who realizes his children are eating low nutrition “food desert” meals downwind of a polluting oil refinery, is not going to stay silent to this type of insidious racism much longer.
Similarly, the woman who sees all the CEO’s of giant agriculture and oil corporations are damaging the air, soil, and water will no longer let her “gentler sex” designation shut her up.
We have already witnessed the beginning of this trend, as more and more native Americans struggle to stop pipe liones, racist appropriation of names and logos, and protection of aboriginal lands.
Threads that only we can spin
Obviously, people need reliable and truthful sources of information. Facts and science can not be abandoned, but will need to be further embraced.
The spin doctors that embroider every story with prejudice and political agenda are being more exposed every day. In Portland, this last week for example, fact checkers immediately seized upon inflammatory rhetoric. As a result, there are signs that the Federal “storm troopers” are backing down.
The myriad threads of social and physical reality, once hidden in the tapestry because it is so big, are now being scrutinized in great detail.
Our biggest challenges, as the primary drivers of civilization — the people — must be to discover all the many ways the threads come together to make a stronger social fabric.
And, chillingly, we have to do this under enormous pressure as the climate crisis looms amid all the pandemics to come, and the political turmoil that follows.
Our job, is to stop all the threads from unraveling before it’s too late.
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Previously published on Medium.com.
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Photo credit: Solidarity sign in Portland, July 2020, Christyl Rivers