Clarification

about some things said in the last substack post

I’m sorry for all the emails coming so fast. Feel free to unsubscribe if you are getting sick of the frequency of these communications. The world has been crazy this past week and I feel myself slipping into a weird irritated space of hyper-creativity and motivation which is good and also bad. My mind is racing and I want to get this all down to explain some things to you.

I just want to let you know that, after I sent the last Substack newsletter entitled “Antipsychotics,” I had a strong feeling of unease that I included the Kool AD lyrics in which he said death to America and seemed to be calling for violence to address the environmental doom problems facing humanity. I take this seriously. After the email went out, I went into the substack post and deleted those sections so they aren’t on the website anymore but they are still in the email newsletter you got from me yesterday. I’m troubled by this.

I do not subscribe to utilizing violence and I do not subscribe to “death to America.” I am a pacifist by nature. I was merely including those comments in the last email because I think it’s telling that people are even joking about this in response to the climate change threat that some are taking more seriously than others. As I’ve said before, I don’t subscribe to violence and I don’t call for it. However, similarly to what Kool AD said, it does seem logical to predict and expect that individuals or groups could resort to violence in the face of the escalating problem. I won’t do it. But neither will I be shocked or surprised when people get more extreme as the problem gets more dire. I think great conflict and bloodshed is coming. I think it is a fair subject to explore in the context of writing about it and utilizing 1st amendment free speech rights to talk about it. I think as engaged writers we may have a responsibility not to incite violence but to discuss it before it may or may not break out to try to prepare society in some small way for the contemplation of a reaction to violence, which may or may not be inevitable. I’m in favor of peaceful solutions but on the other hand it will not bowl me over with surprise if some desperate human beings try to take matters into their own hands using force and violence.

I have thought about writing a piece of literature entitled Truckbombs for Greta which explores this situation, in fictional form. The situation of people pushed to an extreme desperate place by impending environmental disaster. In my untrained amateur opinion, I don’t know if individuals using weapons could effect radical policy change in reducing carbon emissions and reversing environmental damage and the greenhouse effect or whatever concept you want to use. It feels like it would take nations using foreign policy with each other to try to effect change. But nations resist each other and move so slowly, and there are deep vested interests committed to keeping things as they are, or pursuing inflexible goals of constant economic growth which will set us on a pathway to destruction if we’re not on such a pathway already.

To snap the world’s economies and corporations out of the hypnotized trance, which they have been under for millennia, that “growth is the only option, the only acceptable future” and thus try to reduce greenhouse gases, seems impossible. The steering wheel is in the hands of people who can only see competition, gains, profit, growth, and they ignore or deny the science that is telling us that we’re headed down a path of doom. This will lead individuals and groups to become more desperate and to lose their fear. If abolitionists took up arms to fight slavery in 19th century America before the Civil War, because they felt that the situation of slavery was unacceptable and was not changing fast enough, even if it led to bloodshed, even if it in clear ways precipitated the Civil War—what is to stop masses of people from thinking the same about climate change when the specter of total destruction creeps ever closer? If committed individuals in the milieu of radical Islamic resistance to the rest of the world start thinking in terms of surgically striking at their enemies in order to try to set large historical forces in motion—terrorism to defend Islamic religion and lands—why won’t the same sort of thing happen when people who see the terrifying ecological consequences of their government’s actions coming?

I am just one person. I can only think one person’s thoughts. Maybe I’m sorely mistaken: it has happened many times, and there is ample evidence to suggest that I don’t know how to think properly about things. I can’t predict the future. But it seems to me that there are clues current today which when taken together could point in the direction of huge waves of unrest and violence and wrenching social and geopolitical change in our future. If the entire middle band of equatorial earth becomes uninhabitable because of higher temperatures, populations from the global south will try to move toward the poles to find relief and safety. There’s not much as much land in the Southern Hemisphere to receive migrating populations as there is in the Northern Hemisphere. Food and water will become harder to find and distribute. Political structures will break down and conflict will break out. The belligerent anti-immigration groups and policies in the USA that we’ve seen over the past decades will seem like a quaint, tranquil memory in the face of the massive pressures in demographics and mass migration that could be coming. I say this not to stoke any sort of racist global prejudices against other countries. I’m just saying: if you thought your gun-collecting neighbor was anti-immigrant before, wait until the enormous increases of people trying to get into the USA and up into Canada where it is cooler and there’s more water and space to live.

There could be a fight, and a global conflict beyond anything history has seen before. Border control could become not a hot button issue but a platform upon which a strong, frightening, authoritarian bunker mentality government is based upon in order to “keep the rest of the world out” and prevent them from climbing on board the life raft of North America, Europe, Russia, and sinking it. This will have horrific racial repercussions pitting global north against global south. I’m just using my most fearful imagination right now. I don’t know what to do.

This started with me apologizing for the scary words in the last newsletter. I’m fearful that somebody could read that email and think the wrong thing about me. I’ve had many subscriptions in the past weeks and I don’t know who a lot of these people are so I don’t know what your interest in me or my writing is. I don’t know what usefulness you could find in my writing, my words, my ideas. I’m not trying to scare anybody, just express my thoughts and feelings and fears. I get really fearful, you all should know. I was just interviewed this week and my final thought in the interview was “make peace with your imagination.”

That’s not likely to happen any time soon. In this world? With this set of facts? I guess my own very small goal in writing this particular email is to reassure some random reader out there that I’m not a threat really, but I do think it is a responsible use of the pen to write about some of these huge difficult problems and try to think them through. And that means going to scary places sometimes. In a broad sense, it’s not against the law to write about scary things. The writer maybe has a responsibility to go to scary places. When I wrote the crime novel Blood Trip I felt a great unease that I was thinking these thoughts, the thoughts of a murderer. I think crime writers have a really bizarre job. We think of awful people doing awful things. We spend time in those head spaces. Resurfacing is not easy. Finding meaning and spiritual calm is hard to do. Consciousness is a curse and world consciousness is even more so. I have this theory that in some ways we were not supposed to gain the global consciousness that we gained when technology allowed us to see every surface of the planet at once and know the condition of every other person on the planet. I think that in ancient times, your “world consciousness” was just your little piece of land where you and your civilization lived. You did not know the rest of the world. There were wars. There were travelers. There were diplomats between civilizations. There was a sense at the periphery of another place and other people. But you were limited. And I think your knowledge of the world’s evil and the world’s danger was withheld from you by your incomplete ability to gather information.

Now we have photos of planet Earth from space and nearly instantaneous news of conflicts, horrors, outrages, bad shit from all over the globe on our phones and tapped into our minds. Our global consciousness, our awareness of the planet, is overwhelming and too much. And it seemed to arrive just in time for us to watch our own destruction taking place. We have front row seats, because in this Information Age, the front row can be everywhere.

I’m sorry this message is so gloom and doom. I need love in my life! I need to be with someone because when you’re in love the whole prism through which you see the world can change and you might get not notice or care about the big picture. Or you might take it in in a different way. Your mood lens will be…clearer? More oriented toward the clear light? Happier? Open to joy? (I hate that word.) I could use some oxytocin and dopamine and all the rest of those good hormones or whatever. It’ll happen. It’ll happen and I’ll be happy but then another fear, another insecurity, a more limited one than global, will make itself known. The pangs of love. Jealousy. Misunderstanding. Emotional torment and longing. Melancholy that is never more poignant than when it is to do with a relationship. But what a relief that modest melancholy would be from this big one.