Fear Of Falling

Lately I’ve heard about people I’ve known or relatives of people I know falling down and dying. Last night week I got into my car and turned on NPR and was suddenly in the middle of a glorious interview with the great Kurt Vonnegut, author of books that were part of my growing up— Cat’s Cradle when I was in high school, Welcome To The Monkey House and Slaughterhouse-Five when I was in college. I will always identify him as part of the anti-war movement that dominated those years for me. But as I was listening to him talk, I realized the math doesn’t work. He couldn’t still be alive, could he? He’d have to be at least 100, no? And then I realized… this was an old interview honoring his 100th birthday, which was yesterday. As it turns out, Vonnegut had fallen down at his home, causing brain injuries and then death in April of 2007, age 84.

People don’t think of falling down as a big deal… until it is. For me it was a few years ago (2015) when I was in the middle of chemo and all drugged up. I woke up in the middle the night to urinate and fainted and fell down, broke two ribs, punctured a lung and spent 7 hours trying to get to a phone so I could call 911. It was the beginning of one of the most horrible and uncontrollable chapters in my life— falling and what followed. I survived, but just barely. More important, though, will the species, our species? A few days ago, New York Magazine published a piece by Elizabeth Weil, How To Live In A Catastrophe, which I highly recommend reading in its entirety. Focusing on the Climate Crisis, she wrote that “we missed 1.5 degrees and probably also missed two, and two degrees (by which people really mean 2.3 or maybe 2.5) will lead to unspeakable suffering.’If we are not able to reverse the present trend that is leading to catastrophe in the world, we will be doomed,’ U.N. secretary-general António Guterres recently said. I’m not talking about your fear that you’ll lose control, your frets that life will get messy. I’m talking about Earth’s ecology losing equilibrium and falling down the stairs. I’m talking about a society that’s simply not built for the weather that’s coming.”

Our clown-car democracy. Our warm embrace of surveillance capitalism. Dobbs. Just days ago, Elon Musk bought Twitter and the fascists openly rejoiced. Six months ago, a teenager killed19 kids and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, while hundreds of law-enforcement officers stood around. Plus the big granddaddy catastrophe of them all, the planetary crisis. The planetary crisis… what a term. Your life is still stable enough that you’re reading magazine articles.You’ve got that huge lucky fact going for you. But even so, how could a person possibly stay sane and oriented? How could a person think straight and well in a moment such as this?

You try. You really do. You’re an A-minus person, maybe B-plus. You sweat out the record-high temperatures this summer in Shanghai or London or Anaheim or Salt Lake City or Sacramento.

You watch CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward reporting from the floods that cover one-third of Pakistan. There she is, in her pink tunic, blonde hair pulled back, getting bumped by oxen; interviewing dazed, desperate families streaming down the road to get to higher ground; visibly baffled by her own journalistic relationship to non-interference. And you see she’s doing her best, too. Working with what she’s got. “What is so pronounced here, John… is you don’t see any aid workers,” she says to her anchor back in his air-conditioned tower in New York.“It’s interesting when you talk to people. There’s a lot of resentment, too… And they’re asking for reparations— money.”

…One day, dressed in a sackcloth, head covered in ashes, Noah went to the city. A crowd gathered around him asking who had died. Noah replied to the crowd that they themselves were the dead. Confused, the crowd asked when. Tomorrow, Noah said. “The day after tomorrow, the flood will be something that has been. And when the flood will have been, everything that is will never have existed.”

But, Noah went on to explain, waiting to accept this as reality on the day after tomorrow will be too late. “The flood will have carried off everything that is, everything that will have been.”The catastrophe will have occurred. “If I have come before you, it is in order to reverse time, to mourn tomorrow’s dead today.”

Noah left the city, took off his mourning clothes, and returned to his workshop. That evening, a carpenter knocked on his door and said to him, “Let me help you build an ark so that it may become false.”

…Saint Bill McKibben’s commitment to nonviolence is nice, [Swedish activist, eco-Marxist, writer, and professor Andreas] Malm argues in Pipeline, but what nonviolent movement ever succeeded without the threat of violent backup? Patience is a quixotic virtue. Are we supposed to wait patiently to hold politicians accountable for their 2030 or 2050 climate pledges until 2028 or 2048, when those politicians are out of office? Are you really going to feel good about yourself in Calamity 100 if you’ve been well behaved and little has changed?

Malm’s book doesn’t really tell you how to blow up a pipeline. It educates readers in the much chiller affair of deflating SUV tires, an entry-level form of sabotage that has been gaining traction in Europe and even some places in the U.S. Here’s how you do it:

1. Unscrew the tire cap on a tire. Inside, you’ll see a pin that releases air if pressed.

2. Place, Malm writes, “a piece of gravel the size of a boiled couscous grain or corn of blackpepper— or, we suggested, use a mung bean— and screw the cap back on.”

3. Leave a note explaining that this was an act of sabotage: “We have deflated one or more of the tires of your SUV. Don’t take it personally. It’s your gas-guzzling SUV we dislike.”

At its root, the planetary crisis is a race for time between the forces that continue spewing carbon and the forces trying to prevent them. Everyone knows we’re moving way too slowly.(Worldwide emissions are still rising.) Why not consider sabotage? … But violence makes sense only if your primary concern is speed. If your goal is to cut through catastrophe’s fog of uncanniness and make people integrate the fact that we’re in a catastrophe at all, love may be the tool for you.

OK, at this point, you either want to read this whole essay or you don’t. Steve Bannon even makes an appearance. I’ll be leaving that up to you now. Meanwhile, please be careful; don’t fall, especially not when you get old.