Climate Change and Your Nerves

 Climate Change and Your Nerves

East River Park where 400 trees were cut down
& mulched to make way for an environmentally dangerous development
of fancy apts. Same old same old. [photo by Sarah Sarai]

Last Tuesday my weekly talk group - all of us senior and queer - hit the subject of feeling anxious about climate change - are we?/aren't we? anxious. And our guilt and fear, right-now fear and right-now guilt related to climate change and its inevitable impact on that thing ahead of us: The Future. Did we stop it? No. Many of us, to some degree or another, tried, ie, recycled and sometimes boycotted. If you have tried to mollify the planet or if you haven't, it's coming. We agreed we had the anxiety and probably each of us thought more about the messed up Earth awaiting us. The messed up Earth here and now. That giant iceberg that's about to break free. Birds. Always birds. Often cats, too. 

So I was relieved to read a very relevant article by reporter Ellen Barry in the New York Times (monthly subscription costs $4!). Here's the first few paras from Climate Change Enters the Therapy Room.

PORTLAND, Ore. — It would hit Alina Black in the snack aisle at Trader Joe’s, a wave of guilt and shame that made her skin crawl.

Something as simple as nuts. They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children.

She longed, really longed, to make less of a mark on the earth. But she had also had a baby in diapers, and a full-time job, and a 5-year-old who wanted snacks. At the age of 37, these conflicting forces were slowly closing on her, like a set of jaws.

In the early-morning hours, after nursing the baby, she would slip down a rabbit hole, scrolling through news reports of droughts, fires, mass extinction. Then she would stare into the dark. con't.

Yeah. The thought of mass extinction will do that to you.

I would expect that only the captains of industry who push denial like it's soft serve ice cream consider climate change it's a momentary blip. Or believe their fortresses will protect them. Which they won't. God could but God never seems to step in until ten million or sixty million people have been slaughtered. And even then... Anyone's guess. So I recommend you read the article. Here's a little more to bide you over:

It was for this reason that, around six months ago, she searched “climate anxiety” and pulled up the name of Thomas J. Doherty, a Portland psychologist who specializes in climate.

A decade ago, Dr. Doherty and a colleague, Susan Clayton, a professor of psychology at the College of Wooster, published a paper proposing a new idea. They argued that climate change would have a powerful psychological impact — not just on the people bearing the brunt of it, but on people following it through news and research. At the time, the notion was seen as speculative.

That skepticism is fading. Eco-anxiety, a concept introduced by young activists, has entered a mainstream vocabulary. And professional organizations are hurrying to catch up, exploring approaches to treating anxiety that is both existential and, many would argue, rational.

Again, from the Times.

Dear White People: Yesterday I Told You We Are White - Guess What - Another Day and Still White. Deal with It.

What I forgot to mention when chatting myself up yesterday* on the topic of whiteness was that a particular white person, Frank Bruni, who pens Op-Eds, has moments of pain in the ass-ness.

He's also a writing prompt. His NYT op-ed this weekend, I'm a White Man. Hear Me Out, prompted me to barf. Or almost. He begins with this whine. (A whine should be an orchestral instruction.) 

I’m a white man, so you should listen to absolutely nothing I say, at least on matters of social justice. I have no standing. No way to relate. My color and gender nullify me, and it gets worse: I grew up in the suburbs. 

Waaaaaaaah! What a coy maiden he is. But wait! He's gay! And from ye olden times, when it was tougher to be queer. I'm older than he is, from when it was tougher to be a dyke. And? You know who was from oldener times? Oscar Wilde. Imprisoned. Shamed. Despised. But so eternally loved.

So I wanted to reference one of Bruni's idiocies parading as insight and argumentation. He quotes black writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who wrote, Losing My Cool.

“My black father, born in 1937 in segregated Texas, is an exponentially more worldly man than my maternal white Protestant grandfather, whose racism always struck me more as a sad function of his provincialism or powerlessness than anything else. I don’t mean to excuse the corrosive effects of his view; I simply wish to note that when I compare these two men, I do not recognize my father as the victim.”

A quotation which Bruni uses as EXHIBIT A, if the court please! He maintains that because a black man, Williams exalts his father and because black people who do not have the limiting disease of racism, everyone should pity Bruni who does have that limiting disease. 

Of course white people know suffering and learn to transmute it in fire, in which souls are purified. But so what. Bruni states, "My gayness no more redeems me than my whiteness disqualifies me." Ahhh. He's a walking embrace of all mankind, that Frank. I wonder what a logician would say about his reasoning which goes like this: That person has welts because he was beaten. But I hurt too, Ma, and much of MY hurt bubbles in the shallow hole of my not having been beaten. Am I not a man?

Odd and distasteful, Bruni's argument is EXHIBIT B. 

I suggest that  when we accept who we are under the pretty big umbrella of being human, we won't hate difference because we'll see connecting threads
and the beauty and accept our limitations. It's not easy, I agree. One of the wisest bits of advice I ever heard was from a lover: Learn to take your lumps, Sarah. BRUNI!!! Learn to take your lumps, you poor sodden fool with your meagre NYT op-eds.

*Yesterday's post. Click.

Poem: Success. What's up with America's definitions of same? Or the NYT's?

Apparently the New York Times considers the actress Laura Linney a late-comer to success. Sure, that's a journalistic hook, and gives us all a chance to cheer her on. And I suppose I have to pat down my defensiveness--aren't we all successes & co.

Though it's not as if Linney decided at age 40 to finally follow her dreams. And got lucky. She began as a stage actor. Her father is one of my favorite playwrights, Romulus Linney (who also wrote the charming The Jesus Tales--a Beckett-like conversation between Peter and Jesus).

She had an ongoing role in TV's Tales of the City. She was Richard Gere's girlfriend in Primal Fear. This is big stuff, pop culture big. And that's what seems to win the NYT's, in this case, writer Frank Bruni's, respect, although for him, and most reporters (those who report), only total saturation and undying public allegiance are enough.

I see this over and over. A actor who is not one of the top ten in terms of box office (a writer who hasn't won a National Book Award, and on and others) considered to be below par.

Huh? 99.9% of Americans are, by logical or some approximation of logic, failures?

To be a success in America you have to be Julia Roberts or Denzel Washington or their ten box-office-draw equals? Which brings us to:


Success

It takes something to make a life work, whatever your deal.
Something like willingness to be late for the guided tour yet
find your way, you’ve heard the routine, to worship what you
worship and cosset that whispered Remember you’ve been loved,
not believed or cared about for many years, but lingering in
the waxy portals of your quivering ears tipped red. And
there’s no running away unless you believe concrete obscures
the bulk of you you’ve been skedaddling from a long time,
a thing to dissect, not the skedaddling from life’s sadness,
no, try repercussions of life’s sadness arising not from desire
but some childhood omission not overcome. Your little
cheesecloth gut feasts on indigestion and futility. Say what?
It’s not cowardly to seek open arms fleshy and embracing?

______
Sarah Sarai, pub. in Taiga
& included in The Future Is Happy, available at Amazon and Small Press Distribution.