I came inside your rally and it was stupid.
The rally took place right outside the White House. I felt bad for Michelle Obama. Barack probably wasn’t there but Michelle had to listen to all this whining going on outside. “Can’t these stupid kids just join the University choir?” she might ask.
Rallies put me in an awkward spot. See, since the college years I’ve become increasingly left-wing on just about all issues (and I wasn’t moderate to begin with), but when I went to this rally instead of feeling like I was amidst like-minded activists instead I felt like I’d just wandered uninvited into a giant circle jerk.
Metaphor time! Gotta get this one out of the way. In the year 2014, rallies are just a masturbatory act. And I mean that in a nice way, sort of. People go to these rallies to act out fantasies of wish-fulfillment, and even if those fantasies are morally laudable, the actual work being done at these gatherings–the ritualistic chanting and sign-holding and occasional networking and pretty college girls jumping up and down–is all about letting off steam.
Which, with all due respect, I would prefer to do alone in my room.
Maybe I’m just bitter because I was too nervous to talk to anyone. But maybe also, it makes me really annoyed that on an issue that is incredibly important like the Keystone Pipeline, which is what this rally was protesting against, all these young people are talking their righteous anger and channeling into a mediocre impromptu musical revue, an green-themed “Les Miserables”.
People hate Tom Friedman. But one thing he said which I think is pretty poignant (and I’m paraphrasing because he said it at a talk he gave at my undergrad college): “This is not a green revolution. This is a party. It will only be a revolution when we see losers and people fighting for their survival.”
He was talking about the broader context of moving towards a greener economy, and the obnoxious labeling of “green” products, but it applies just as well to the other side, of how we take up the challenge of promoting and advancing environmental consciousness, especially in a country where at least half of the population either doesn’t believe in global warming or doesn’t believe it’s worth caring about.
My professor Matthew Nesbit argues excellently in the link below that while the depth of knowledge about scientific issues has been increasing thanks to social media, the breadth of people who partake in this sharing of information has not:
Environmentalists, who are a pretty fragmented bunch as it is, are completely losing the war on fossil fuels and unsustainable development in this country. Obama answered the young people’s plea for an alternative to the XL Pipeline with a big fat “Fuck You”, when the State Department released their environmental impact statement last week. You can see it here:
http://keystonepipeline-xl.state.gov/finalseis/index.htm
You can also read about it online, but the joke here, and it’s a good one, is that extracting the tar sands is so inevitable, resistance is so futile, that one need only worry about the negligible impact of the PIPELINE itself. Whose path was fixed so it no longer goes over most of the Ogalalla Aquifer. Problem Solved.
Pipelines don’t kill people. People kill people.
And this is good news to millions and millions of people. As someone put it to me recently, trying to stop the Keystone Pipeline is like trying to get people to eat less fast food by protesting the latest McDonald’s. Now, it’s not quite that simple. This McDonalds will ensure that McDonalds will operate for at least the next 40 years, and that all their food henceforth will have extra cholesterol. But it’s true that the feeble attempts at piecemeal progress are at this point about people trying to feel better about their own guilt. This can extend to some environmental NGOs and advocacy groups as well.
People at the rally were chanting absurd aphorisms like “Every time people have gotten organized and fight, they defeat big business!” “When people get together and care about something, the will of the mighty bends to them!”
History proves this!!!
Stop trying to feel so good about yourself. The truth is that environmentalists need to do more and do better, to find a way to argue their positions more around values and persuasive arguments. To appreciate that this is a “culture war”, which is about finding away to defeat the very powerful business interests that move against them, as well as bringing more Americans into the fold, people who environmentalists normally scoff at and condescend to.
But it doesn’t matter if you think Bible-thumpers in middle America are a bunch of stupid assholes. There are stupid assholes everywhere. You don’t need to convince everyone, but you need to convince a lot of people, and no attempt has really been made at a national level to decouple concern over climate change from partisan politics.
That is one reason why I think bottom-up, grassroots attempts to attend to climate are failing miserably and will continue to fail. They can only attend locally to the localities that already are on board with them. That is how you get pockets of America that are intensely aware of the problem but also intensely ineffectual at accomplishing meaningful progress.
Also consider this: http://ens-newswire.com/2014/03/02/hundreds-arrested-protesting-keystone-xl-at-the-white-house/
Early in March, 400 people got arrested and congratulated themselves for it. The are calling themselves “XL dissent”, which is nice except for the fact that they are a theater troup, not a national movement of protesters. People were discouraged from attending the rally who did not attend the “mandatory training sessions.” People were discouraged from attending if they were under 18, as the interpretive dance staged in front of the White House was anticipated and involved getting ‘arrested’ and a $50 fine. I’m trying and failing not to be glib here, the threat/promise of arrest sounds like a noble act, but it really amounts to a participation fee…and also discourages foreigners from joining the rally in a meaningful way because they could get deported. So a handful of rich college kids got themselves arrested. They were expecting ‘thousands’ of people. They got 400.
What’s wrong with a little stage, prepared climate activism? It just doesn’t accomplish anything. It’s not goal oriented, or it is, but the goal is stupid. The goal is to get press coverage, but it’s theater, so the goal really amounts to just getting reviews. They’d be better off if they billed it as “flash mob climate art”, then maybe they’d make the arts section of the paper instead of page 47 next to the obits.
This is what it looks like for the system to be letting off steam. All these kids mean well but along the way they slipped into the exhaust vent and got discharged from the system in a puff of smoke. The politicians can dismiss them. The oil-and-gassholes can dismiss them. Middle America can dismiss them. Canada can dismiss them. James Hansen cries. Dakota McKee takes another xanax. Mother Earth prepares for war on the humans.
We really do need people to elect national-level leaders who will address the issue. We will need to force the political climate to change or for politicians to change the way they discuss the issue. This will require an exponential increase in concern from people in this country. It will require re-framing the debate so that people across party lines or different backgrounds can care about the interrelated issues of climate change and sustainability and do something about it.
If Obama approves the Keystone XL pipeline, his climate legacy is finished. We are ‘losing’ the war. But it’s not over yet. We just need to change tactics.
Culture Time 