I should be away on my next bikepacking trip soon. I’ll see how that goes, as my last rides were physically demanding. Or is it mental? It’s ‘ras le bol,’ as the French say, meaning ‘to the edge of the bol,’ in English that would be, ‘I’ve had it to the back teeth.’
Most people are hell-bent on living as long as possible, whereas for me, the years left have become a burden. I’ve always been more interested in what is socially useful than in acquiring wealth; my ex-wife would attest that statement to be indisputable truth. I never earned enough, but I can say that hundreds of young people’s lives were improved by stepping into the youth service I was running. Government figures put my positive outcome rate at 63 per cent, meaning that of the thousand I worked with in Western Sydney alone, 630 young lives were stabilised, with many entering safe accommodation, further education, and employment. After youth work and having missed out on much of a formal education, I never finished high school, I went to university as a mature-age student and got a degree. I even went into a masters, but quit when I realised how biased the curriculum was. Not worth the thousands charged per unit of study, when you find texts linking the Intifada to 9/11 and such beauties as Charlemagne alive and well in the 18th century. I kid you not, it would get a kid in primary school a fail in history. The kicker was an email from the academic supervisor saying he would be in Tel Aviv to attend a terrorism conference. Checking the conference website, I found that a speaker was General Antoine Lahad of the Southern Lebanese Army, to which the IDF contracted out torture, including that of women and children. The Arabs call him ‘General Hummus’ because he ended up running a restaurant in Israel when countries, including France, refused him residency. He was condemned to death six times in absentia. I didn’t think a representative of an Australian university should attend a conference where this subhuman creature was a guest speaker, so I quit my masters program. That’s when I decided to launch into an extensive investigation into human trafficking and child abuse, which blew up in my face because of a lack of experience and the fact that I had in my cross hair a person typical of the type of client I had as a street boy, and like an attack dog, could not let go despite all signs screaming at me to do so. He could pay for the others. Such recklessness may well have had something to do with the long-term effects of trauma I’ve spoken about in previous posts. I wanted justice and was not going to let it slip through my fingers.
Today, all that is history. I’ve tried, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Che Guevara wrote that when fighting from a position of inferiority, do not attack unless you have high confidence in your ability to win. You need allies, and all I found are cowards who, as Winston Churchill said of democracies, deserve the government they get.
With just over a decade of life left, if I’m lucky or unlucky, I see children of all colours running around our local shopping centre. When, from its stroller, a child gives you the gift of its smile, I know what awaits that child. He, she, does not know, but I do. I’ve read the science, and it’s not a hoax, as that criminal in the White House, straight-faced, claimed at the United Nations General Assembly. I ask myself, is there anything more I can do? I’ve done as much as is possible for an individual who has no further agency in his community. I started a small group of climate activists years ago, which became the local branch of Extinction Rebellion, but was elbowed out when it grew to several hundred members. Now, all I can do is ride a bicycle, not fly, and keep up with developments. It’s not enough, given the urgency of the situation, and smiling back at the kid in the stroller feels like a fraud.
In order of threat, we could put climate change at the top of the list, followed by nuclear war, and third is debatable. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is up there, but it is hyped. Could AI become conscious? We need to understand what consciousness is before claiming that a machine has achieved it. The danger of AI is that it is a hallucination.
Climate is the most urgent, as many of the other threats will cascade from inaction on climate change. Climate inaction will lead to widespread famine and water shortages, to entire regions becoming uninhabitable, resulting in mass migration. People are not going to simply sit down and die; they will seek to move to areas where they and their loved ones have a chance of survival. It’s ironic in ways that Palestine is in the future uninhabitable zone, as is most of the Middle East. Most likely, there will be a mass migration towards Europe. Russia would simply shoot anyone seeking to cross its borders, as would others. Will Europe and other democratic Western nations, closer to the poles, do the same thing when faced with hundreds of millions of climate refugees? I’m reminded of the neutron bomb, a bomb developed by the United States as a solution to the Cold War reality of the Soviets being able to deploy 100 thousand tanks and roll them into Western Europe in a day. The Europeans’ response to the United States when it wanted to deploy these wonders in places such as Western Germany was, “Are you mad!?” The bomb is nuclear, but where it kills anything that walks, even if that living flesh is inside a tank, it leaves the pretty countryside intact. The Europeans well knew the Soviets would quickly match the capacity, if they hadn’t done so already. An indiscriminate weapon of mass genocide that today could solve the climate refugee problem. It’s, after all, seventies technology, and maybe the reason billionaires are building themselves bunkers.
Other signs of danger include the collapse of democracy we are witnessing throughout the West. Looking at military white papers and other studies, we see that climate change is taken seriously and aside from war between nations it also creates a real threat of domestic unrest. Civil and political rights are being removed one at a time, the executive gains ever-increasing power, and the legislative branch passes laws that are mostly useless for the stated purpose. Much of recent legislation amounts to surveillance and control, precisely what would be needed by a weak state found to have failed to protect the population from existential threats predicted decades ago. A weak state is one where the government rules because it has low public consent, whereas a strong state has a high level of public consent and limits itself to governing.
At some point, the world’s population will realise climate change is not a hoax. When people find themselves fighting over the last bag of potatoes on the supermarket shelf, when there is no fresh water flowing from the kitchen tap, they will seek out those they hold responsible, those who fooled them into believing you can have your cake and eat it as well. Well, you can, but only if the global population drops to one billion. The level of population the planet can sustain while all live a Western consumerist lifestyle.