Hoping for The Flowers

 In November of 2016, I wrote a blog post that alienated many good friends and would have alienated some loved ones had they read it.  Like many friends and colleagues who had grown almost complacent with the ease and clarity of the Obama years, the results of the election of that year shocked me to my core and I was upset to say the least.  I described what I envisioned to be the fallout of the new Trump presidency.  It was something that I saw as catastrophic to the egalitarian, New Deal foundation upon which I had grown up thinking was at the core of this country and the direction in which it was undoubtedly headed.  And so, I was candid.  And I lost several good friends for it.  And I was fundamentally wrong.

While the fears I had voiced were realized, I had not fully grasped the way in which 1 stalwart, angry voice could essentially re-balance the scales of what society sees as right and wrong.  I had assumed, incorrectly, that the angry voice and his minions would be in a vacuum and the rest of us would stay the same, but I gave humankind too much credit.  Like electromagnetic forces, all voices picked a polar opposite and nothing was left of the middle.  And so I learned that any incremental change can become the norm with a little time and persistence.

So here we are again.  Eight long, complex years later, we face another, more sophisticated ouster of the mainstream, or what is left of it.  While I am not hopeful that we will do any better at finding a middle ground, I have never been more stalwart in my appeal that we must.  

We must ask hard questions of ourselves and quit spending energy to describe the vices of our opponents.  This only fuels the fire and gets us no closer to understanding how to diffuse this massive incendiary that has been put in our hands.  

Our social media echo chambers have to stop.  While social media holds promise for both positive and negative discourse, we only seem to gravitate to the latter.  Our inclination towards unbridled innovation and deeper technological insulation will be our demise if we do not find the personal courage to turn it off and turn our eyes to the material.  

As they say, we are like frogs in a frying pan.  That is, unless we remain vigilant to the changes that are happening.  

The climate tipping-point that once seemed like a far-off, dystopian possibility is now estimated to be only 2 decades away, and scientists from around the world agree that by the time my young nieces are old enough to enroll in college, at least 1 in 4 children worldwide will live with a severe water shortage and that ecosystems will be experiencing catastrophic collapse.  

“We are only just entering our brave new world, one that collapses below us as soon as we set foot on it.”

― David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth

Many would agree that we are already in a free fall.  Hurricane seasons continue to worsen and year-over-year temperature increases are relentless.  While weather patterns of the past included wet and dry periods, the weather shifts are more severe now, with 1000-year floods occurring at startlingly frequent intervals.  Although not quite over, 2024 stands to be the warmest year on record globally.  This is no coincidence.  Without ways of tracking these alarming shifts, we cannot track the severity or speed at which they are taking place.  

The Biden administration published an executive order redoubling the commitment of the Federal government to address environmental justice concerns in this changing climate. The administration also passed the Inflation Reduction Act which did more to effectuate funding and efforts toward addressing climate change than any legislation ever before.  While the administration doesn't have a perfect track record of environmental progress, it made larger strides than arguably any US Presidential administration before.  

By Spring 2025, 2 of the government links I've provided above will either have been taken down or the documentation will have been rescinded.  By all accounts, the new administration will eviscerate Federal agencies and the climate protections that have just only begun.  Regulatory authorities will be stripped from Federal agencies like from the EPA and income thresholds for the nation's children receiving SNAP benefits will be almost doubled.  And everything in between.  

Maybe that's just bluster, but maybe it's not.  And in 8 years, will the bounds of what we believe to be right and wrong have changed as much as they have in the past 8?  That's what frightens me.  Because, if our understanding of the fundamentals of right and wrong can change that dramatically, then we can fool ourselves into thinking that any incremental change, such as rainfall or when daffodils open in the spring, is just business as usual.