Radical New Thinking May Not Be So Radical

Release the Crack Team

It’s time to deploy our military forces to combat the existential, and moral issue of our day: the Climate crisis. It’s also time to take responsibility for the fact that all people, male, female, or no, all a have a part to play. Racial and gender justice, climate injustice is a human rights issue. We can’t pit color, gender, or even rich and poor, against one another and expect different results.

It’s time for a crack team of competent and capable people in charge.

This week, choking smoke from the largest, hottest fires in the west, yet, blanketed New York City. This week, a red tide of dead fish stunk up Florida. Flood waters pounded Europe and China. Politics did politics. Britney Spears was heard. People reviewed #MeToo and found it lacking. A supreme court justice may turn out to be beer-sodden scumbag as related by several unheard women. Some rich men, and a token woman, went to the edge of space. Fires and cancel culture firings, floods and soggy excuse for assault in the armed forces and Hollywood, shootings, and gripes all around. Madness and misery, regret and recriminations.

Okay. I understand there is a lot to unpack here, and it seems to be all over the place.

But, it’s not. It’s all on one planet. Our own. Our only one. Our only home is under threat.

Earth Justice must be our number one cause. It should be. Thinking like an ecopsychologist means that you soon realize “everything has everything to do with everything.”

Class wars and politics are excellent for selling stories and creating scapegoats, but most media is out for sensationalism, not solutions.

Hierarchy, the golden arches

Let’s look for one common denominator to link everything, it unpacks easier than a billionaire space parachute that way.

Structural hierarchy, or domination hierarchy, traditionally demands that certain people (let’s not get into name-calling,) have more privilege than others. When these individuals amass great wealth exploiting others, and don’t pay their fair share of taxes, those others resent it. When others of them simply ride public transport, they somehow take up more space, or have a louder voice. Marginalized people want their share. They want their own voice.

They even want their piece of what is left of a cindering world.

The entitled, “golden arches” that soar over everything is hierarchy. An idea protected all the way up until Earth herself cried rape.

Will no one think of the children?

The Earth herself has a voice, but today it’s raspy from smoke, and her children — mostly the wild ones — are dying. A ranger, almost in tears last week, told us near the smoking woods, that “we are losing the birds.”

Do enough people care about “the birds” to realize without such pollinators and planters, we lose much of our food? Or that we are overcome by plagues of insects, invasive plants, and more? Do people really understand as they fight to make a living in structural systemic hierarchy, that without the gleaning and cleaning of nature we are going to suffer immensely? This is not for doom and gloom purposes — not fear-mongering porn. It is a wake-up call, one of about a billion of them called by clarion callers over the last century: you have power, use it.

Already, I get enough hate mail to know that some people are just going to tsk and assume Christyl Rivers has another murder hornet in her bonnet. Okay. Maybe I do. But, I’m not the only one. It remains true that we have to consider, at least reflect upon, what such “radicals” are thinking and feeling, and why.

As Greta Thunberg says, we also have to listen to science. At least listen, before you dismiss. Technology, wisely employed, can not only send billionaires safely to space, it can make safe spaces for Earthlings.

Blue lady sings the blues

Blue Origin is a cool name, I guess, for a phallic Lex Luther looking bullet like thing to shoot into space courtesy of workers who may not get to go — but do, occasionally, — get to pee in a bottle, (just like a real astronaut). But a Blue Union, a loose coalition of united people serious about the climate crisis and willing to collaborate internationally with engineers, CCC, writers, artists, clerks, medical staff, drivers, and so on, do get it. Those leaders who STILL don’t get it, must be forced to see it. It’s no use to burn down the Amazon for beef production if everyone dies of plague, pollution, plunder, or plastic, in the long run.

Fossil fuels, or any toxic fuel, must be rethought, re-allocated, and even reprimanded. We still subsidize filthy fuel and don’t demand clean, shiny jobs that are more permanent than boom and bust ones. Who should have these jobs?

Oh, I don’t know, former sex workers forced to ply their trade illegally in tar sands towns, or near crappy coal pits, maybe? All POC and indigenous people who are more often “disappeared” than they are awarded top CEO positions at energy companies? Black women, or LGBTQ people, who are endlessly persecuted? Maybe fat people? Maybe the otherly-abled?

The trickle of refugees you see now will triple and then some. Don’t want them in your backyard? Even I — in a three year transition from Kona chocolate/orange farm — to the sanctuary of the Pacific Northwest, am having second thoughts about triple digits. Quadruple concerns.

My point is, we need everybody. Everybody, even those seeking asylum should be allowed fire-prevention jobs, tree planting jobs, fire education jobs, or even fire fighting jobs. And then there is wildlife and habitat protection. Who should do that? Dunno, maybe people who breathe?

Now what’s this about an army of Earth?

We pay, and deploy our troops, even our police, to defend, protect, and serve. Let’s give people in need of work, or housing, service jobs, make them safe, pay them accordingly, thank them profusely. Let’s make all people in uniform, heroes, not threats. Such a radical idea.

Oh, but you say, people in uniform need porn, who will do that? That’s a good question. I don’t have all the answers on how to make people feel honored rather than exploited, but we can find smart people who do know how. What little I do know tells me a woman who sells sexuality whether she is Britney Spears, or Stormy Daniels, needs to be respected as full human being. And people who exploit such people? They need to be shamed, maybe even locked up, in some cases. TONS of powerful men get away with rape and harassment and that’s just Weinstein and a former president whose name I can’t remember.

Oh, wait. Maybe that’s every former president with a few notable exceptions. After all, presidents also run corporations and once again, we need all kinds of people running those. All must contribute to the higher good, even Fox news can become heroic and use its power for good. The ice is breaking, we need to talk.

Wait, it sounds like a Marxist army! There’s a specter haunting Europe, and …wait, no, it’s just water borne disease and slime mold. …

Whoops, there goes Venice.

No, it’s not Marxist, exactly. It’s democratic socialism, emphasis on democracy saved, writ large. Vote and protect voting. Build an army of people who want to serve because, for the sake of mental health — to say little of survival itself — we need to protect what’s left.

But what about the children eaten by Satan worshippers, what about the unborn? In my book the unborn are those who will look back from 2100 and curse, or sigh, a breath of relief.

“I can’t breathe” is not just a slogan for 2020. It’s something that happens worldwide when we try to police people with tear gas rather than empathy. It’s in every major city. It’s in a Covid variant cough. It’s in birds and bees falling with ash and smoke out of the sky.

Let’s change that with a radical notion: let’s breathe.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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