The Ukraine, Trump, Climate Change And Crime on the Streets

If you’re seeing folks who seem more down in the dumps than usual these days, it’s probably not just COVID fatigue. Many of us are suffering from a thoroughly modern psycho-social ailment best described perhaps as too-much-information-with-too-little-power. It feels all too often like the world is coming apart at the seams and we can do nothing about it.

In the last two weeks or so, we’ve learned the painful lesson of instantaneous, ubiquitous globalized information — that what happens to other people half-way around the world can always happen to us. More and more of us are literally feeling the pain of the world. With information technology in every corner of our lives, we’ve come to feel as if the “news” is not a detached reality but an intimate part of our own daily experience. The anywhere-anytime news, even if it’s not reporting about us, it is indeed happening directly to us. And there’s so much of it, and we are so entangled in the webs of social media and the dark florescence of the information age, that much of the time we can only try to duck and cover.

But there’s just no way to dodge it. As Joanna Macy, the 92-year old environmental activist and Buddhist thinker, was quoted as saying to Dahr Jamail in a piece about staying sane in 2014 edition to Truthout, “Refusing to feel pain, and becoming incapable of feeling the pain, which is actually the root meaning of apathy, refusal to suffer, that makes us stupid, and half alive … It causes us to become blind to see what is really out there. We have a sense of something being wrong, so we find another target and project our anxiety onto the nearest thing handy” which creates a politics of blame and scapegoating.

“I look at the path we’re on, to the future, as having a ditch on either side,” she wrote. “We have to hold on to each other, not fall into the ditch on the right or left, which are, on one side, panic and hysteria, and on the other side is paralysis and shutting down.” We all need each other more than ever now to stay sane and commit to keeping upright and as clear headed as we can. There’s really no place hide.

There could hardly be anything more personal for many of us than hearing the doomsday threats made by Vladimir Putin after he’d invaded the Ukraine and put Russia’s nuclear arsenal on high alert. It triggered memories of a moment nearly 60 years ago during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the US announced a quarantine of Cuba to prevent the Soviet navy from supplying the island with more nuclear weapons. At a pivotal moment in October, 1962 I was holding my one-year old son in my arms out on the front lawn, having what I thought might be my last cigarette, seriously wondering if I’d even wake up the next morning. My wife was so terrified she decided there was no reason to wash her hair. Many of us my age have had PTSD about that night all the rest of our lives. And now the world’s misery is so much with us, so much of the time, that to be a “modern person” seems to mean to be automatically part of a collective trauma, with the nightmares, flashbacks and burning anxiety that comes with it.

In the last weeks, we’ve experienced not only brutal armed aggression in Ukraine, every bit as horrifying as the Soviet suppression of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and of Hungarian freedom fighters in the 1950s, all equally as terrible as the wars and clandestine monstrosities the United States has carried out in Central America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. We’ve also read of a UN climate change report that basically says it’s all over for a livable planet unless the governments and corporations make moves right now that many of us fear we’ll never be able do in a hundred years. We’re also getting frightening crossed messages about the criminal complicity of Donald Trump in the January 6, 2021 attempt to overthrow Congress and a presidential election. And here in our own state, on a road that many of us have traveled thousands of times, a policeman and a fireman were killed in a criminal high-speed chase by a woman intoxicated on meth who was speeding on the wrong side of I-25 into oncoming traffic.

And now we’re beginning to understand how close we came to suffering a totalitarian coup on January 6, so close that re-reading “1984”feels more like reportage than fiction. What Rebecca Solnit writes about the Soviet Union under Stalin, in her book “Orwell’s Roses,” holds true for “stop the steal” Trumpian America today. The “regime of lies breaks down the psyches of many who live in its grasp, convincing them to abandon the search for truth and accuracy in their own thoughts and words as well as those of others. Sometimes this takes the form of intellectual surrender, a cowed willingness to believe everything it is convenient to believe, sometimes cynicism, a refusal to believe anything and an assertion that everything is equally corrupt.”

And now, Trump’s white supremacist supporters are cheering Putin as a hero for invading the Ukraine, a man Trump called both “a genius” and a leader possessing unique geopolitical “savvy.” In Florida last month at the America First Political Action Conference in Orlando, commentator Nick Fuentes was heard to say in his introduction of Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, “let’s give it up for Putin,” whereupon the crowd, devoted to preserving the “white demographic core” of the country, let out a roaring cheer. It’s come to that. But you have to wonder if Putin will turn out to become Trump’s political concrete boots?

The personal tragedies of a drugged-up New Mexico came home hard last week on I-25. As a former police reporter, I always feel a raw sadness when police officers die in the line of duty. That Robert Duran, a Santa Fe police officer from Rio Rancho, and a retired firefighter, Frank Lovato, from Las Vegas should both have gotten caught up in a nightmare chase scenario leaves all of us who’ve commuted on I-25 feeling shaken and snake bit. It literally could have happened to any of us. Last year, 470 people died on New Mexico’s roads, many of them at the hands of drunk or drugged drivers, according to the Albuquerque Journal. And 99 pedestrians were killed in 2021, as well. Combine those two numbers and it’s alarmingly close to two traffic-related deaths a day. It seems like an insoluble problem, almost as intransigent as climate change.

Just as we were reeling from politics, naked aggression in the Ukraine and traffic deaths at home, global news informs that a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report concludes that “climate change is upon us and humanity is far from ready,” according to Reuters. Nearly half the world’s population, the report said, is vulnerable unless “drastic action” on a ”huge scale” is taken immediately. “A third to a half of the planet needs to be conserved and protected to ensure future food and freshwater supplies.”

The U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said introducing the report “Adaptation saves lives….Delay means death.” He continued “Unchecked carbon pollution is forcing the world’s most vulnerable on a frogmarch to destruction. The facts are undeniable. This abdication of leadership is criminal.”

With news like this bombarding us virtually every moment, how is it possible not to fall into despair sometimes? Maybe we should just shut off the whole mad cycle of global news and pay more attention to the needs of our immediate surroundings. And why not? If we hope to have any positive role to play in our world it will most likely have to be very local, very engrossing and indefatigable. The work of individuals with little power will most likely involve preparing cities cope with the ravages of rising temperatures, and our city too, as I’ll report in the next column. And we’ll have to keep ourselves, and our companions in struggle, on an even keel somehow. We have no duty to gobble up all the news there is. We can shut it down from time to time, but we do have a duty to help the world, as our limits, skills and talents allow. But we can’t do it if we’re stupefied and paralyzed with fear. We all need each other to be as open and strong as we can be.

As Joanna Macy says, what people ache to do is “to tell the truth of their own experience. Tell what they know and feel and see what is happening to our world.” And when they do they find “the feelings they feared, (and that) the feelings didn’t last, and the feelings turned into relief and a sense of empowering solidarity with others.” And when that happens, people can break out of their “self-imposed isolation into an energizing collaboration.” I can’t think of anything we need more right now than that.

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