Stop normalizing your own extinction

We do not actually have to live like this.

Recently, a friend and I were making plans to take our toddlers to the beach. 

She said: “Well, the sky is gonna be filled with toxic smoke on Thursday and it’s gonna be dangerous for the kids to breathe. Friday?” 

Completely casually. As though she was suddenly remembering she had to take her elderly beagle to the shampooist on Thursday.

This quiet, mundane moment during a routine schedule negotiation made every cell in my body explode into a tiny rage festival and, dear reader, has led me to the creation of this here newsletter. 

Jesus Actual Christ. Okay:

We do not actually have to live like this. We do not have to instantaneously metabolize and normalize the psychotic physical, mental, spiritual, environmental, financial, and emotional abuse that our governments and Petroleus The Sacred Oil Lord and the five interchangeable white billionaires called like W. Keith Northernpeen are heaping on us every fucking minute of every day. 

I know we’ve all got decades of corporate programming wires to rip out of our respective solar plexuses (solar plexi?) but please, please do not start to “find a workaround” for apocalyptic skies choked with toxic poison. Do not absently manoeuvre around the Li’l Inconvenience of An Uninhabitable Planet the way you’d accept a road being closed off for your city’s annual 10K. 

I stood in my kitchen staring at my friend’s text, at a loss for how to respond. It definitely seemed like the salient part of her statement was the whole “we’re being gently murdered by the air” part, not so much that the murder was taking place on a Thursday. Like, before we lock Friday down for a playdate, could we perhaps take a beat and sit with what you just said? Like, holy fuck, that’s a little bit unacceptable, eh? Could we grab an eighth of a nanosecond to acknowledge our grief and terror as people who’ve recently brought children into this hellfire of a world? Could we brainstorm a plan for how we’re going to help fix this? Could we ask each other how this current reality makes us feel? Could we even laugh at the dark absurdity of planning a chill beach hang under these deranged circumstances? ANYTHING?

I get that I’m Immediately Okay With It!™ is, for many of us, a trauma response. It’s your brain’s protective reaction when the people in power don’t see you labouring to survive in the inferno they’ve created, don’t listen to you when you protest, don’t ask you what kind of world you want, and don’t care when you make the effort to tell them. I feel the powerlessness you feel. The hopelessness, the overwhelm: it is, after all, increasingly hard to believe that putting a Mountain Dew can into a slightly different colour box when you’re done drinking from it offers a formidable counterweight to Shell dumping 5.2 trillion litres of bitumen into the ocean. I get that completely.

But even if you don’t have any internal fire left to match the external one. Even if you feel like one of those blowy guys at a Honda dealership at 6:01 pm when the manager’s just unplugged the fan: I’d love you to even just be a sports commentator. A Greek chorus. A narrator. I’d love you, during your day, at every possible opportunity, to reply: “wow, that’s not normal” and “wow, that’s not okay”. To share how these assaults on our safety make you feel. I beg you to choose anything other than “ah WELL, this is just our life now!” (I know, I know: the media keeps pumping out articles like “Five Fresh Fun Flirty Outfits for Lounging Beside A Fully Dried-Up River” but still).

Because we are normalizing the shit out of so, so, so much abuse:

“Sorry for the delayed response, I had to take all four of my kids to the ER twelve separate times this month and then my laptop battery died after the 82-hour wait to receive basic healthcare”. What in the totality of fuck? No. Stop it. These things are not normal, not ethical, not sustainable, and not okay. A) your kids are constantly sick because your government is forcibly and repeatedly infecting them with a very dangerous virus that destroys the human immune system; and 9) you and your family deserve fast, responsive healthcare but the aforementioned government has destroyed it by failing to respond to the flaming hell they unleashed in nightmare A).

“Ugh, sorry I can’t have coffee today, our whole house has the summer flu.” Summer flu is not a thing: you have COVID. Why do I feel like if the government announced they were sending a giraffe to everyone’s house to violently trample each of us while we were sleeping, 96% of people would wake up the next morning and immediately go, “shit sorry I can’t come into work today, I have Nighthoof Indentation Syndrome” as though that’s a recognized string of words in our society, or has ever been.

“I was ordered back to the office three days a week. Sigh! Oh well!” I don’t give one one-millionth of a shit how normalized this practice has become: it’s absolutely not okay that employers are forcing people back to in-person work during a raging, wildly uncontrolled pandemic with zero public health precautions in place – most especially now that we have mountains of evidence confirming how destructive and devastating repeat COVID infections are to the human body. It’s extremely dangerous. And it’s morally unconscionable.

COVID and the climate crisis are intimate partners in a shitty and terrible tango, and the abuse we roll over and accept with one will inform the abuse we allow to be heaped upon us in the other. 

If you’re awake. If you’re resisting. If you’re opting out of the status quo – even when it’s unpopular, uncomfortable, lonely and thankless work – this newsletter is for you.