Twitter reminded me yesterday that one of the worst things to do is fall prey to despair. I’m really good at it, though; I usually freeze and give up in the face of danger, as opposed to fight or flee. But in the case of this particular catastrophe of ecological destruction, that isn’t helpful.
I think the key to finding a way forward is to utterly reject the cis-hetero-patriarchal (aka kyriarchal) approach and look elsewhere for a way to address the interwoven issues before us. We’ve tried looking at things in a way that prioritizes power over things. That’s what the kyriarchy does. Men are over women, whites are over POC, ableds over disability, individuals over groups, and those at the top are rewarded with wealth, which is just power converted into currency that can be wielded to garner further power. It’s all about power. And power is a greedy motherfucker, and demands that it be demonstrated, so powerful people find it nearly impossible not to turn off their empathy and execute power to prove that they deserve to be at the top. Hence, abuse of all kinds.
There’s no winning when some people are on top and others are beneath them. So what does it look like when that system is rightly thrown out?
It looks like a world where the health of the community matters. Where we stop assuming white ways are the right ways. We could, I don’t know, actually listen to the people who lived in North America before we got here, the people whose ways of live have been built on a codependent connection to the health of the land for millenia. And yeah, we’d probably have to give them their land back. We should do that.
Maybe we should look at people around the world who haven’t built their lives around extracting as much as possible from the land, the animals, and the humans around them in order to further their personal gain. Maybe we should try conceiving of an earth-based economy, rather than a financial one, where value is attached to the health of the land, animals, and people together.
Just spitballing here. I am not an economist. I am not anything but a sad, angry woman who wants to DO SOMETHING. I want to see new ideas for drastically upending this garbage system that has traumatized so many. I want those ideas to be taken and run with. I want one trillion trees planted. I want the world leaders to agree to cancel fossil fuels. I want guns controlled, domestic violence condemned, gender and sexual expression embraced, disabled and neurodiverse people treated as equal humans, and people of colour to have the freedom to exist that they are asking for. And honestly, I don’t understand why the hell you all don’t want that too.