Good Men and Women Are Doing Nothing, and It Shows

We need more.

“Just shoot them in the legs or something.”

That was our president a couple of years ago, talking about protestors, at least according to the former secretary of defense.

He also talked about bombing Mexico.

That’s not even the worst part.

The worst part is our secretary of defense listened to this rant, and decided to do nothing. He chose to keep it a secret, because it would make for a juicy tidbit in the book he was planning.

Even that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that nobody’s surprised. Nobody seems to care.

They should.

Good men and women aren’t fighting climate change.

Here’s a really timely quote:

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.

— John Stuart Mill

Bad men and women are triumphing right now.

There are millions of good people out there. A lot of them are in the fight. They’re using all the tools they have.

It’s not enough.

Look at what’s going on.

Everything from the climate to the economy is going down in flames, and most people out there are completely ignoring it, at least over here in suburban America. They can’t be bothered.

Our current president made climate change a central part of his campaign promise, but he just signed off on a frakking boom that’s going to release 140 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases. That’s going tip us right over the edge we’ve been trying to avoid:

It means the US, the centre of the world’s addiction to oil and gas, will play an outsized role in the heatwaves, droughts and floods that will impact people around the planet.

Further expansion will be catastrophic for climate change, and poses a growing threat to the health and well being of families and communities living near drilling sites.

— The Guardian

This marks a complete violation of trust, and it’s going to ruin our children’s futures. We don’t even need all of this oil and gas, because we already have most of what we need to transition into renewable energy right now. Our current president might as well be saying, “just shoot them in the legs.” He’s just doing it with fossil fuels.

It’s an outrage.

We should be protesting these moves every single day, but it’s hard to convince half of Americans they should even care. They even think it’s necessary. A lot of them read this, and consider it doomsaying. That’s what bothers them most.

Go figure.

There’s no more time to be moderate.

A lot of good men and women justify doing nothing.

They call themselves “moderates,” as an excuse for staying silent on the collapse of ecosystems and human rights.

Here’s the truth:

You can’t be moderate anymore. The stakes are too high. We’re not talking about slight differences in policy.

We’re talking about women’s rights to their own bodies. We’re talking about the right to breathe without choking, and to raise children in a world without deadly viruses clouding the air. We’re talking about the right to a future without epic floods and heat waves.

We’re talking about food.

Being moderate means sitting back and allowing bad men and women to control the world. When you downplay the loss of rights and life, you’re letting evil throw a parade.

Take the recent acquisition of Twitter, by the world’s richest man. Plenty of good men and women shrugged it off. They told us not to worry. Some of them even celebrated it. Now that man wants to let an aspiring dictator back on — you know, the guy who wanted to shoot protestors in the legs. Again, some people are trying to stop it.

They’re trying to resist.

It won’t be enough.

There’s no more time to be optimistic.

I’ve heard enough from the optimists.

Optimists quote factually inaccurate statistics at us, and downplay disaster. It’s all they ever do anymore.

Here’s some truth:

Life is not better than ever, at least here in America. Our life expectancy is going down. Fatal drug overdoses have reached all time highs. Poverty and food insecurity are spiraling out of control. The cost of shelter is soaring out of reach, along with basic medications. There are actual landlords taking advantage of all this, and forcing young women into sex in exchange for rent. New parents in America can’t even get baby formula.

Is that enough?

It’s really something to hear optimists shrug at all of this and call it fear mongering. Some of them would even say it’s not wrong for a landlord to offer sex for rent, because a woman could always just choose to live on the streets, even if she works a full time job and still can’t afford a place to live. That’s how optimists seem to think these days.

They’re not offering us hope.

They’re trafficking excuses.

We can’t go gentle into the night.

Here’s a poem that most of the English nerds know:

And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

— Dylan Thomas

Honestly, I never thought I’d live in a time where those words felt relevant. Now they’re more relevant than ever.

Until recently, I considered myself a pessimist.

I was wrong.

I’m what you’d call an intrepid optimist. We don’t make excuses for the state of the world. We don’t sit back and watch while bad men and women impoverish us and destroy the planet. Even if we only stand a 50 percent chance of winning, we’ll take it.

We’re not going gently into that good night.

There’s lots of ways we can resist. Not everything needs to be a street protest. We don’t have to spend 24 hours a day shouting and chanting at the top of our lungs. Everyone has a role. Everyone has different skills and tools, and we should be working together. We don’t need more people telling us to sit down and chill out. That’s not hope.

That’s complicity.

We don’t care what political party you support. If you’re not standing up for human rights and our future, we have no more patience for you. We’re not going to let the world go down in flames.

Not without a fight.