The Walking Dead 6

I have been listening a bit and reading about the riots taking place in Paris right now as workers have declared that they have had enough of taxes, particularly the unpopular carbon tax imposed by Emanuel Macron. The claim is that they don't care about global warming or climate change when they can't even afford to live on the little they are being paid for long hours of thankless work. Point taken. There are of course echoes here of what swept the Dump into power in the Paranoid States south of the border. Climate change from global warming, it turns out, is an elite boutique cause that low-paid and exploited workers simply are not going to connect to, and for two simple reasons: 1. lack of education, and 2. lack of income. I can relate too easily to this because this also touches on how slow it has been for me to warm to climate change (do pardon the pun, Gentle Reader, it's very early and I need to go back to sleep for a while). However, there are some variables here and, for my consistent readers, one will find throughout this blog that my life has often been full of variables. While I have never had trouble accepting the science, and the concern about climate change, I also for some years considered this to be more of a concern for the privileged classes. My priority was, and still is, anti-poverty, housing for the homeless, and housing being declared in this Great Land of Ours as an essential human right. I have been a bit slow in accepting and seeing how much the two issues of anti-poverty and climate justice are really deeply connected matters. Simply said, justice is justice is justice, whether justice for the poor, justice in housing, or climate justice, and they all need to be tackled at once as threads woven together in a seamless garment (whoops! pardon the purple prose, Gentle Reader, I'm still not wide awake!) But we do have a tendency here in Zombie Nation to compartmentalize everything, to categorize and paint everything in breathtaking shades of black and white. Neither does it seem to help that the lower the level of education, the greater likelihood of being an exploited and underpaid worker, and the less inclined one is going to be to connect the dots, and especially because of lack of education. Remember one of the Dump's campaign speeches when he crowed how he loves the uneducated? Because they voted for him and swept him into power. The same people, the predominantly white underpaid American working class in the heartland who got shoved aside by globalization? And of course they are going to be hopping mad. Who wouldn't be? And being uneducated, they are not going to have the intellectual toolkit for connecting everything between the economy, the burning of fossil fuels, powerful multinational corporations, and their own miserable condition. And demagogues like Dump and others are going to town on this, manipulating them through media lies and social media fake news, to vote form them and to maintain their loyal fanbase by appealing to the collective reptilian brain of Zombie Nation. The so called elites aren't any better, by the way, for the simple reason that they do not seem to know that the uneducated exist, other than to serve their needs in the local Starbucks or food court, or to scrub clean their stinky toilets for a miserable low wage. I know this, because I straddle both categories. Even though I'm a college dropout, I am still well-educated, and well-read and well-informed, so I totally get where the privileged folk are coming from. The science is in. We have to stop using fossil fuels, and give up meat. Right now! Yesterday! And like the uneducated, or if you like, the proles, I know what it is like to go through life working at thankless and underpaid labour, and just being able to get by because I lack the credentials and the connections to do any better than earn less than a living wage. I am one of those casualties of globalization who live vulnerable and at risk to poverty, hunger and homelessness. I feel their pain because it is also my pain. We have to start being more careful, more creative and kinder and more caring of one another if we are going to ever close this breech and really get working together on fighting climate change while doing our utmost to support and protect one another, across class and party divisions. Yes, it is possible, but we really have to want this to happen badly enough before enough of us are going to do anything about it.