Speaking with some exaggeration, ignoring the idea that the planet Earth is a sphere rather than a circle and more ovoid than perfectly round, the planet is a wheel -- turning, always turning, going dark and going bright in predictable sequence as it circles the sun.
We are its products, made persistent by our ability to change ourselves or even change the planet so as to preserve a fit. But it's not a perfect fit any more than it's a perfectly round planet. Nor does it move in a perfect circle, but wobbles as it goes while the sun dims, flares, and sends waves of force.
But "perfect" is a concept for wealthy privileged young women whose daddies provide weddings, however many it takes, so their daughters can demonstrate how important and powerful their daddies are. As the world has turned for thousands of years but particularly for the last centuries, these men have been fortunate, at least some of them have, until now we're beginning to resent the way they use the privilege and blame them for everything, even climate change, as whole countries slip beneath the waves and another kind of wave, that of disease and climate change, wash through cultures.
China has avoided the disease of predatory capitalism to some degree but it is striking that closing all the factories to keep the fuel of human effort from burning in a virus, has cleared the skies over China. No more smoke warming the climate, at least for a while. In other places instead of dying of famine because crops are too controlled for profit and we're too dependent on repetition, around the world people are suffocating from the lung virus of Covid 19. It remains to be seen whether this will alter demographics enough to change nations, but it might. Maybe already.
The linking of empire emanating from small European countries and viruses springing from the Asian side of the continent where people have learned to eat anything they can catch (which is also true of African countries) may temporarily solve the problem of overpopulation. We eat the planet and we eat each other.
Lately it has become plain that the "old white men", fossilized by doing what they've always done even though the world has changed, are stuck to the wheel of culture-persistence that meets the road of resources. They are about to be crushed. This may be the last year that photos of people in suits gathered around long tables in important places show only white males. I hope.
They deny and despair.
"The diseases of despair are three classes of behavior-related medical conditions that increase in groups of people who experience despair due to a sense that their long-term social and economic outlook is bleak. The three disease types are drug overdose (including alcohol overdose), suicide, and alcoholic liver disease."
"Diseases of despair, and the resulting deaths of despair, are high in the Appalachia region of the United States. The prevalence increased markedly during the first decades of the 21st century, especially among middle-aged and older working class white Americans starting in 2010, followed by an increase in mortality for Hispanic Americans in 2011 and African Americans in 2014. It gained media attention because of its connection to the opioid epidemic."
"Diseases of despair differ from diseases of poverty because poverty itself is not the central factor. . . . Instead, this affects people who have little reason to believe that the future will be better."
I do not have subjective first-hand knowledge of despair. But I've lived on a rez for about twenty years and next to the same one for the same length of time. The deaths of despair have been far more spectacular here: car crashes, murders, death-by-cop, exposure, large angry animals, beatings of the vulnerable -- "soul murder."
The early paragraphs of this post are the ideas of Anne Case.
https://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15078 She wrote the paper pointing this out. "This paper documents a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013. This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics."
If farmers are included in this demographic group, outright suicide by gun or hanging has to be added. Because they are going broke and their families are dispersing to save themselves. They only know one way to live and the expertise of Anne Case, a health economist, can only point out the problem rather than offering solutions.
It's in the Bible, you know: "in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus declares that in the world to come, “The last shall be first and the first last.” Jesus suggested a new planet: the Kingdom of Heaven, but if that has worked out, no one has sent word back to us. Unless you count "Star Trek."
The policies of old white men that made them rich have also sealed their doom. Hiding all profits in bookkeeping tricks in secret corners instead of spending profits on the "least of these" and failing to complexify occupations so they make room instead of simply crowding out real people, has now caught up with them. Globalization has exceeded their ability to package the wind for mercantile purposes.
Sneering, they have said not "let them eat cake" but "let them eat grass," which turns out to be poison in quantity.
And the President who thinks he's the king of the world has to have his food pureed in order to keep from choking on it. When one thinks about all this in metaphors, one either laughs or cries. I'll be more constructive next time.
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