Hesitance, Procrastination, the Slow Poison of Waiting To See

I’m becoming convinced that the feeling of being swamped, almost capsized, by the tumultuous distractions of the daily news — its reveling in violence, cruelty and the endless reports of unconscionable stalemate and gridlock bickering — is caused in large part by a 21^st century kind of political solipsism and the policy paralysis, escapist indifference and personal despair it brings with it.

It’s not unlike living in a Godzilla movie with faint hints of reality murmuring from behind the screen. We’re terrified and bedazzled and often unfathomably bored. The unreality of the world that the media gives us became frighteningly clear two weeks ago when we were tantalized with hints of catastrophe wrapped up in superficial hype and then baffled by a disappearing act that obscured the dire UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group Report on the now-or-never adaptations the human species has to make if it hopes to survive intact its universal vulnerability to global heating. The report was gobbled up so fast by the deadening quicksand of the media’s ongoing horror show that we could hardly believe what we heard. And before we knew it, the news moved on, and there was nothing more to hear. The silence was deafening.

You could say the same thing about the public response to Albuquerque’s forward-looking and responsible 2021 Climate Action Plan — if not deafening silence, then certainly little more than the barest whisper. In both cases, political solipsism has dehydrated our political will.

Solipsism is a state of mind far beyond mere selfishness and egotism. As a personality disorder, it’s the conviction that only you and what you think really matters. In politics, it’s a social disorder that means only you and your allies are right, absolutely right, and everyone else is wrong, absolutely wrong. Opposing camps don’t and can’t listen to each other, and certainly can’t dialogue, or engage in give and take. It is a world of screaming, supercilious indignation, intellectual puffery, bullying gaslighting and other tortures of intimidation. It’s an all-or-nothing monster fiction of politics. Everyone’s caught in the bogs of animosity, where nothing happens fast enough or wise enough to matter.

Our conservative-leaning culture and its media has become so brittle and reflexively suspicious, that hesitation and procrastination have become inhibiting social diseases exactly when deep debate, decisiveness and profound commitment are most called for. A world weariness undermines local esprit d’ corps, as well. We can’t even talk about climate change without becoming somebody’s scapegoat or patsy.

It’s at times like these when a sense of futility takes hold, a sense that can sometimes only be counteracted by drawing from the wellspring of optimism and compassion found in the words of our mentors. Many of us probably remember what historian Howard Zinn had to say about hope counteracting futility:

…human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of the world in a different direction…. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Political solipsism, though, drains hope of its power. The politics of stalemate is meant to frustrate, to thwart, to inhibit and to stall. The noise and rancor of political solipsism can cause us to question even our curiosity and personal history of combating pessimism and inaction. It creates conditions that make cynicism reflexive and installs dismissiveness as a default position.

When it comes to local concerns over global heating and its impact on the livability of our city and state, the tidal wave of negative news has to be overridden by the conscience of curiosity in our citizenry. A good place to start is searching the internet for the City of Albuquerque’s Climate Action Plan 2021. It’s easy to. And once you read it and see its strengths and its limitations, you might feel compelled to alert others of its existence, lobby for improvements and work to get a groundswell going of public interest and policy debate.

The Plan was put together over “months of community conversations” by a large “climate action task force” made up of staff members from New Mexico First, members of the military, city and county policy wonks, university scholars and students and other experts. The task force seems diverse and made up of people of many perspectives. And the report says that over “3,000 Burquenos” offered additional input. I’m sure many more of us would have liked to have been included in those community conversations, or to have at least known they were being held.

The climate action plan deals with, among other things, sustainable buildings, renewable energy, clean transportation, waste and recycling, economic development, education and “awareness” and “climate conscious neighborhoods and resources.” The plan focuses on what it calls the “experiences of Albuquerque’s frontline communities – communities that will be impacted ‘first and worst’ by the effects of climate change.” The communities include “Indigenous, Black and other communities of color, as well as communities of low-income and other groups that face greater exposure to pollution and climate hazards with more limited resources to respond.”

The plan’s “guiding principle” is to “move beyond policies that focus primarily on the role of and responsibility of individuals and look at larger systemic issues.” I presume this means “capitalism,” the car culture and the fossil fuel economy. But it’s unclear. The plan has many strengths. But what it omits is disappointing. And the reason for the omissions is disappointing too.

While it’s not clear in the document, the Climate Action Plan is purely a City initiative, not a city/county initiative. In other words, it does not represent the full governance structure of the Albuquerque metroplex. Many of our area’s most environmentally threatened frontline communities are in the county. And without the county’s input, water quality issues, overseen by a city/county entity — The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority — have been hardly mentioned at all, despite water being our most vulnerable resource in a climate changed overheated world. So dealing directly with the present drought, the worst in the last 1,200 years, is beyond the scope of the city’s Climate Action Plan.

That’s why I couldn’t find references to Albuquerque’s groundwater pollution problems, including the 24-million gallon jet fuel spill at Kirtland Air Force Base, nor the well-documented groundwater pollution issues at Sandia Labs. I couldn’t find references to landfills old and new and their danger to groundwater, nor any reference to septic systems and leaking underground gasoline storage tanks. I couldn’t find direct references to the pollution ravaging the South Valley’s Mountain View neighborhood, a “frontline community” if there ever was one, with its smokestack emissions, two superfund sites and numerous brown fields, junk yards, dead auto yards and fuel storage tanks. They’re all in the county.

Still, the city’s Climate Action Plan is a document of wide-ranging scope and importance, and does not deserve the virtual news blackout, and poor PR exposure, that’s befallen it. The city’s leadership should be talking about it all the time, to counteract not only the zone of silence that shrouds it, but to stimulate the local power structure to more boldly face local problems. And the plan should become a consistent part of the public discourse around helping Albuquerque to make the transition from a vulnerable, quiescent and distracted city to one that faces up to the challenges of the future with its eyes wide open.

Yes, actually taking the climate action plan off the shelf and putting it to visible use will cause groans and yelps of rage from political solipsists and all or nothing purists. But the document itself is so full of positive and useful ideas that it could well not only survive such onslaughts but actually stimulate considered public action upon which to build a less vulnerable future in the heated world ahead, if people learn that it exists. At this point anything it takes to galvanize action and shut off the droning howl of “information” distraction has to be looked at as a pragmatic windfall of hope, even if it’s only a partial endeavor.

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