I Regret that I Have but One Life to Give for Ten Gallon Hats and Happy Meals

Trashy conventional wisdom holds: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” It’s like the national anthem of toxicity and fragility. If you aren’t a loudmouthed asshole asserting yourself on everyone around you (hey, why’s everyone avoiding me?), you’re getting manipulated and deceived.

Well, I dissent! (There! I’m standing for something!) Staying quiet is every bit as meaningful as what you voice an opinion on, maybe even more meaningful. Tacit assent is how societies make a lot of their most important decisions. Decent German citizens stood by while the Nazis took power, because they were afraid of losing the advantages afforded them by membership in German society. They silently supported the aims and means of the National Socialists, and by avoiding losing their standing in what they viewed as a polite and good society, Germans ended up participating in the deaths of tens of millions of people through genocide and war. They let fear of a little thing (loss of job, loss of validation) precipitate an outcome that was far, far worse.

I don’t see this complicity as some passive thing or an aberration that the individuals involved get to obviate, even though contrition or outright repair. Time is the original nonfungible token. It is passing inexorably for all of us, and so when we participate in something through inaction, we are surrendering the value of our time to that thing. Once given, it cannot be regained. We have sacrificed a portion of our lives for it, less immediately but no less meaningfully than the soldier who signs up to fight on the frontlines and takes a bullet through the helmet while sketching a tiny songbird in a moment of inattention on the battlefield. So sad.

The Germans have — god bless them — spent decades atoning for what their country did in World War II, even paying reparations for it (which is more than you can say for a certain country that profited…scratch that — is still profiting on the backs of black slaves), but that doesn’t grant the generation of people who went along with Nazi nonsense a chance to go back and relive the 1930’s and 1940’s in al alternate universe and dedicate those decades to the thing they should have done: put their priorities back in order and stand against the Nazis. It’s too late. As the Watchman says, always was, always will be…too late.

I would therefore like to amend the motto to read:

“We’re all going to die for something, so take care to make it something that isn’t irredeemably stupid.”

This exhortation might seem a bit abstract. Death often does seem a bit distant to us. Oh, sure, I’m going to die someday, but that day is so far into the future as to have no bearing on the present; and of course, we spend much of our lives convincing ourselves we’ll live forever, if not in this world then in the next, in which case: we can waste all the time we want.

However, we’re all dying in fast forward right now— COVID is (at the very least) picking off septuagenarians who might otherwise have become nonagenarians (and forcing the “what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger” set to twist themselves in rhetorical pretzels to pretend that it isn’t picking off plenty of 40-somethings and the spare 30-something who might have had another half century in them). More centrally to the point of this piece, global warming is kicking into high gear. I know it’s winter right now, but winter is — believe it or not — not an antidote to global warming. It is amazing each year to watch America heave a collective sigh of relief that it gets colder, as if the seasons are completely foreign concept to them. It is an ahistorical culture, so maybe it makes sense that we seem to have no conception of the past or future. Remember how unbearably hot it was last summer? Remember how the entire West Coast was on fire? Remember how we were mired in a drought…oh wait, no, that’s still happening. Vast stretches of the West are in exceptional drought despite flipping the calendar to late fall. The soaking rains of winter are MIA, replaced for the nonce by repeated attempts by Hawaii to drown British Columbia. Sorry, Colorado — no water for you.

I remember, and I think ahead. Spoiler alert: there’s no reason to believe next summer will be any better. It’s not like there’s going to be less carbon in the atmosphere come 2022. We might catch a break and the Earth might float a little further into the inky darkness of space, but I wouldn’t hold my breath (actually, if we float further into space, I would hold my breath — save it for as long as you can). How long before entire food chains start to fail? The Alaska snow crab fishery collapsed this year. Crops shriveled in parts of the West. If it’s not next summer, then it’s the summer after that. And if not that summer, then in another summer to come, the heat will eventually surpass the limits of ecosystems to adapt fast enough. Everything is happening even faster than the scientists predicted. They were wrong only for not being alarmist enough.

Unless!

Yes, it’s time for the Lorax to have a word here, and that’s his chosen word (right after the Asian slur of the day — I know I’m not supposed to “cancel” [sic] ol’ Theodore, but if I don’t stand for inclusion, I’ll fall for endemic racism). However, it should probably be a less optimistic word…

If!

If we stand by and do nothing and tacitly endorse the importance of the things that have pushed us to this point, the summer that is to come will eventually lead to all our deaths.

(Sorry, was that dark? I’ve been told talk of doom and gloom is counter-productive, but what is it going to take to get you people off the bench and join the game? We can’t be — to borrow a term from a certain group of folks who love them some derision— snowflakes about it. We have to be brave and face up to the consequences before it’s too late. If a 600-pound man walked into a doctor’s office, you wouldn’t expect the doctor to say: “You look great — don’t let anyone tell you to change a thing!!” Isn’t personal responsibility what all the conservatives prize so much? A whole lot of it is what we need, and we need it right yesterday.)

Okay, so back to our impending doom… What will we have given our lives for? It won’t be a pretty death. Our last few labored breaths will pass over cracked, dust-caked, bleeding lips and parched, scratchy throats in 130-degree heat we can’t escape after the power grid has failed and our A/C has stopped working. The lucky ones who hold out a bit longer than average get to watch our weaker friends and our loved ones go through this same agonizing end.

“I don’t mind. It was worth it to see Apple invent a driverless car.”

Can you believe that is what our greatest minds are occupied with at a time like this? Cars that drive themselves — cars made no doubt largely of plastic, electronics, and other toxic shit that rely on tons of carbon and won’t ever biodegrade — are nowhere near the top of the list of “things we need right now.” They’re slightly ahead of joy rides to the stratosphere and dreams of Mars.

Still, there are even more trivial things we’re all dying for. When I reflect on the lifestyle certain people have become accustomed to, I can’t believe what I’m giving my life away to.

Among countries in the world, none puts out as much carbon per capita as the US for obvious reasons. We drive long distances, because we’ve built our country around the use of liquefied carbon just to ferry a single person 25 miles from their rural home to the nearest Costco. While there, he or she will buy excessive quantities of toilet paper we mowed entire forests down to produce. He or she will buy a massive quantity of food (produced with petroleum-enabled feed) that they will proceed to throw into a spare freezer in their 5,000 square foot home built just two years ago to replace a much smaller, more efficient home that had another century in it. Eventually, they will toss half the food away, releasing more carbon in the process of decomposition. To spare this consumer from having to bring containers for the food they buy, everything is wrapped in single-use styrofoam and plastic. Their way to and from the store is guided by a phone and a car full of electronics that were produced with and will break down into a river of toxic sludge.

That’s what we’re dying for. I might say it was worth it, if that person were happy — if all those modern conveniences added up to a higher state of being — but the US is one of the most miserable places on the planet. That person can do things faster and easier, but will they reinvest that time in things that bring them satisfaction? No, they will just feel the pressure to do more, more, more. The trip to the store is bookended by soccer practices and movies and investments and work, work, work. We aren’t finding happiness, so much as avoiding the discomfort of idleness. Fate decreed that our work ethic should be an iron cage — goddamn you for being right, Weber.

We have to imagine a greater good. We have to be honest about how much progress we’re making. This requires a great deal of bravery. Take a deep breath with me and admit: you’re not getting anywhere. I know you think — as I do, as all of us do (we’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid)— that you’re engaged in securing immortality. You’re running around becoming famous or rich or piling up treasures in heaven. You’re afraid that if you stop or even slow down the littlest bit that you won’t matter.

Well, I’m here to tell you: you don’t. I don’t. Life is mostly about the routines of eating, sleeping, and shitting. I know you think it is about achieving things and that those things provide salvation, but it’s a lie. It’s the big lie we’ve all been asked to swallow.

Set it aside, and realize that joy is to be found in organizing the cyclical patterns of life in a pleasing way with fellow humans. Imagine a society that took happiness as its greatest goal, instead of judgment and forcing others to work as hard as you just to show they deserve to be looked after when sick or valued just for who they are, not for the use they can provide. Imagine if we organized ourselves into communities designed not for people to live out a cowboy fantasy of open spaces and lonely private property we greedily guard with guns, but for fun and lesser impact on the world around us.

It can be done, but not under our existing laws. And by laws, I mean zoning laws. Zoning laws lack vision. They let individuals or individual companies do individual things with individual parcels of private property. You can build an apartment building or you can build a single family home. Maybe you can build a townhouse. The roads and transit systems surrounding these poorly coordinated constructions will necessarily lag behind surging populations, making the places they cluster all but uninhabitable, leading people to leave and loudly declare their contempt as they exit.

There is a better way, but it will take effort to get there. We are simply letting the current inertia carry us along, because we like our cars. We like pretending we are individuals. No one can tell us what to do. We like our plastic trinkets. We like our cheap, fast food.

To avoid dying for all this — for the unnecessarily large pickup trucks and the myth of the West and little plastic toys with a side of fries — we have to think into the future — the scary, scary future — and avoid the fate of Germans in the 1930’s and letting ourselves stand for something that’s not as important to us as our inaction might suggest.