Disempowerment: The Virus of the Information Age

We’re sick with it, and sick of it — this sense of uselessness and disempowerment in the face of the terrible turmoil of the world.

Innocents slaughtered, kidnapped, orphaned, their homes blown up, their lives crushed by aggressors the world over who sell themselves as righteous heroes pursuing noble ends worthy of any atrocity to achieve; the madness of nuclear weapons trembling on the edge of reality, one mistake, one derangement away from what used to be the unthinkable; the pirates of short-term profit from toxic energy aggressively blocking common sense and a chance for long-term survival even as unprecedented wild fires, storms and floods threatened to engulf us all.

So many billions of us want to be of service, want not to feel estranged from the enormity of it all. We witness horrors. We know we are literally blessed by luck, momentarily perhaps, not experiencing such monstrosities directly ourselves.

We ask what should we do, how should we think? Sometimes it becomes clear to us that no one knows what to think or what to do, and that it’s a folly of grandiosity to expect any lucidity from ourselves.

Everything is contested, everything causes a fight, nothing is clear cut. Our own opinions are riddled with doubts and second guessing. Even something simple and seemingly benign as the idea of planting trees causes nasty, unproductive confrontations. Trees, for heaven sakes. The idea of planting a trillion of them is seen by some as a simple and brilliant fix for climate change and the vast complexity of the weather. Others, like Bill Gates, go so far as to say defiantly that he doesn’t plant trees and that planting them to offset climate change is not only anti-science but nothing less than “idotic.”

And so here we are, dizzy from the polarized back and forth, swamped and bewildered by the furious entanglements of opinion, paralyzed by second-by-second avalanches of information.

It may seem silly — even self-indulgent, an example of first world entitlement — to be railing against disempowerment and thinking about planting trees and a green revolution in heat-sink cities when so many people are in harm’s way, running from explosions, murdered, or held for ransom and starving in hidden dungeons. The Information Age gives us too much to think about and way too little detail for much of it to be useful. And so we worry and fret, make charitable drops in the bucket that we have no way of tracking or being responsible for, and risk falling into a kind of social sickness that goes by many names, including fatalism. What are we to do?

It’s not that doing something is better than doing nothing. We know that’s a logical fallacy. But it is about knowing what the right thing is to do and then trying to do it.

Is planting trees a right thing to do? Singapore thinks it is. It’s one million tree project is creating an urban treescape that produces life-saving shade, cools the urban heat trap and calms the general chaos of urban life. Trees have helped to turn many Albuquerque gardens into semi-rural habitats for dozens of species. Earth’s forests worldwide sequester about 16 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases a year. Without them we couldn’t survive. I side with trees on the off chance it makes a tiny bit of difference.

Planting trees, of course, has next to nothing to do with counteracting the horrors of international politics and the slaughter of innocents. But perhaps it is at least a symbolic assault on the paralyzing virus of forced conflict and false balance that infects the information age.

So is there anything useful to do? Yes. We can consult the heroes in our lives, those who were gifted with generosity and altruism. They knew what to do. Some tithed themselves a small percentage of their incomes to have a surplus for sincere philanthropy. Many volunteered to help some cause, giving their time and experience without taking credit for it, following the logic of the Law of Accumulation which says that tiny acts of kindness practiced day after day just might add up to something useful in the long run.

I remember a hero of mine, a hero of generosity, a teacher who secretly saw to it that poor students had food, and colleagues on hard times had a little extra to tide them over. No one knew it was her. Or another hero, a grandmother who took poor kids, trapped in segregation, to the dentist and waited with them all day until they got help. She told no one. I found out by accident. I’ll never forget what she told me after the assassination of Dr. King. Rage and despair made clear thinking next to impossible. But not for her. She told me in a gentle voice what her hero had told her many years before — that even in terrible times the most useful thing any of us can do is to figure out how to “add love to the way things are.”

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it