<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/04/trump-covid-climate-crisis-psychic-wounds>
"Everything is weird and everyone is wrecked. This is maybe the biggest and
least acknowledged truth of life in the United States and a lot of places
beyond right now. It’s the pandemic; the eight years of Trumpism; the
distortions, disruptions and corruptions Silicon Valley has promulgated and
other looming menaces, including climate chaos. We all know this, because we’re
living it, but maybe we should talk more about the fact that our political
catastrophes are inseparable from widespread psychic devastation, that the
public and private, political and personal, are entangled – or rather that the
former has wrought havoc on the latter.
The wisest people I know are aware that the stresses, atrocities, divisions and
divergences from norms of recent years have made them (and everyone else)
exhausted and brittle. The less wise but no less brittle either lash out with
the sense that what’s wrong is definitely someone else or take refuge in cults
and oversimplified versions in which they are at least in control of what it
all means.
Public life has private impact; some of it breaks our brains, and some of it
breaks our hearts. Not to leave our consciences out of this – to watch so much
malice and willful destruction, to witness so much injustice, from genocides
around the world to gross injustices at home, has an impact. That impact is
probably best described as moral injury, which a veterans’ organization defines
as “the psychological, social and spiritual impact of events involving betrayal
or transgression of one’s own deeply held moral beliefs and values occurring in
high stakes situations”.
Most of us have a sense of what’s reasonable or possible based on what’s
happened before; but we are now lost in a sea of unprecedenteds. We have not
had authoritarian threats like this arise in all three branches of the federal
government (if you count a former president aspiring to be a dictator as well
as the supreme court and Congress). We have not previously had the wild
corrosion of information and our ability to pay attention to it the way we do
now, thanks to an internet dominated by corporations eager to offer us
addictive social media and distorted search results and algorithms.
For those paying attention, climate change is also an immense moral injury, a
reminder that we are part of a system shredding the beautiful tapestry of life
on earth and devastating beloved species. Although Covid was a scourge across
the globe, far more people – about 8 million – die every year from breathing
air polluted by burning fossil fuel, and that’s only one aspect of the
devastation, and only to our species."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
