Do We Even Have The Spine To Sacrifice, Just A Little Bit?

Old people are always complaining about how things were harder when they were young. Walking to school in the snow, uphill both ways, that whole thing. So forgive me as I embark on what initially might feel like that old man trope, but stay with me. I’m trying to make a larger point, and I have to start with a few stories of how things were in the Before Times.

So. Back when I was a kid, Big Things That Were Not Entirely In Our Control would happen. Presidents and Governors would get on the (usually black-and-white) TV, imploring us – all of us, mind you, every single citizen of these United States – to do something that would help alleviate the situation. The actions we were asked to take weren’t particularly terrifying – it’s not like we were getting called up to war (though the last-ever draft, for Vietnam, was still fresh in everyone’s mind.)

No, these politicians were imploring us, in the main, to conserve shared resources. I lived in California, and every five or ten years there’d be a pretty bad draught. The Governor would ask us to stop watering our lawns, to take shorter showers, to “let it mellow if it was yellow,” that kind of thing. On the national front, we had rolling OPEC crises, which meant gas rationing – depending on whether your license plate ended in an odd or even number, you could only buy gas on, say, Tuesdays and Thursdays. I also remember President Jimmy Carter asking us to wear a sweater instead of heating our homes to 70 degrees. At the time, I kind of shrugged it off. I mean, Mother Nature is kind of hard to argue with, and so are Arab kings, so if that meant our lawn was a bit brown, or I had to wear a sweater inside from time to time, no big deal, right?

But over the past few decades, something fundamental seems to have changed in the American psyche. It’s now political suicide to ask the public to make sacrifices of any kind. I peg the start of it all the the first Gulf War, when Bush the First responded to the threat of World War III by driving his gas-guzzling boat up and down the coast of Maine. Ten years later, as 9/11 tanked our economy, his son followed up with a suggestion that we shop our way out of a possible recession.

All this came to mind as I was reading a particularly depressing edition of John Ellis’ always-edifying News Items newsletter. Consider the facts his daily news roundup laid on our collective breakfast table this morning:

• “World leaders have made big promises and laid out bold plans to mitigate the climate crisis and help poor countries adapt. They pledged that the World Bank would transform itself to work on climate change, and that the multilateral system would get new money and lend more aggressively. … (But in 2023), the private sector collected $68 billion more in interest and principal repayments than it lent to the developing world.” Put another way, our financial system is profiting hugely off the climate crisis, and not in a good way. But hey, greed is good, right?
• “By 2030, the world’s data centers are on course to use more electricity than India, the world’s most populous country.” This, of course, is due to AI and TikTok and geezers writing blog posts. Two years ago, it was crypto. In short, we’re burning up the planet so high school kids and lazy white collar workers can avoid doing their homework.
• “Boston Dynamics introduced a new version of Atlas (its humanoid, AI powered robot) that exceeds human performance in terms of both strength and flexibility.” Perfect. Just in time. For what, I’m not sure.
• Oh, and gold bugs are in a frenzy – everyone thinks the world is about to end, so hey, let’s buy some metal bars that we can all agree will make excellent post-apocalyptic door stops.

I don’t know about you, but the news today makes me ache for political leaders that acknowledge that there are scary, somewhat out-of-control forces that need to be addressed through collective action. You know, by governing ourselves, by agreeing that together, we can and must have the spine to mitigate climate change and its dancing partner – unregulated techno-capitalistic “progress.” Naming and addressing these issues just might require a bit of sacrifice from each and everyone of us. Or I guess we can just shut our eyes and buy another pair of sneakers off our Instagram feeds.

I for one am ready to wear a sweater, should I need to. Seems the least I can do.

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