Obama, Optimism and Dreaming Up Daily

Close readers may wonder at my mood swings. One day I'm muttering darkly about impending doom, the next I'm quoting President Obama at length about his policies to make things better, and then quoting Howard Zinn on being hopeful. So what gives? What's the secret of my schizzy point(s) of view?

It's not really contradictory, but it may be complex. I admire President Obama for what he's accomplished and what he's trying to accomplish, and I approve of his message. He's a better President and U.S. leader than I thought we'd see again in my lifetime, and I have confidence in him (unfortunately, pretty much only him) to do what it is possible to do, given the current realities of politics and the rest of it.

The difference is this: President Obama professes to be optimistic about the American future. That is, he's optimistic that we can transition into a better future with relatively little pain or disruption. I am not. He's trying to do many things that need to be done, and he'll get done what it is possible to get done. But I don't believe that what really needs to get done to insure the future is realistically possible.

The toxic political culture is not going to permit the kind of change that's necessary. The Republican party is more extreme than ever, its membership is totally of the Rabid Right, for whom the Dark Ages of Ignorance constitutes the promised land. If you have any doubts about that, just glance at the results of the Research 2000 poll. This probably does mean that the Republican Party is shrinking in numbers, but it is still supported by powerful corporations pushing an anti-future agenda. Some of those corporations own information media. And since there are only five major media companies left, that power to control the conversation is considerable.

Meanwhile, electoral politics depends on the growing number of Independents. Independent is a fine sounding name, but it seems to me most Independents are basically politically unsophisticated, easily swayed and manipulated--especially by fear. They go for slogans and new faces. They're not the kind of voters you want to depend on.

We need to do some big things to save the future. But we can't even get a health care bill that has been compromised half to death, and against which there is not a single sound argument, and certainly not a humane one. Instead our political dialogue is frighteningly primitive.

The Obama administration can't even get the media, let alone the people, to acknowledge its considerable accomplishments--even in Congress, and especially in the federal government. But those accomplishments are mostly attempts to repair the damage of 8 disastrous Bush years. Just as Clinton had to struggle for 8 years to repair the damage wreaked by 12 years of right wing GOPer rule. At best, we're getting nowhere.

President Obama is nudging the country to accept the idea that clean energy is America's economic future, that this is America's chance to lead the world again. That's the broadest political argument that it is possible to make, absent the acceptance that clean energy is the only future for civilization. Yet he's getting plenty of resistance on this. Meanwhile, China is already cleaning our clock.

Not that it matters all that much. Because these beginning efforts, while essential, are not going to ease us into a better future.

It's the same with the efforts to halt Climate Crisis feeding pollution. It looks as if the U.S. is not going to adopt carbon cap and trade, nor a carbon tax, and so these efforts will be even weaker. President Obama will do what he can, but the fossil fuel industries still have their grip on the throat of the future. This is just the latest testament to their decades of obstruction and lies. Probably all you need to know is that the Saudi royal family is the second biggest investor in News Corps, the ultra-conservative media conglomerate and owner of Fox News. A foreign power with a vested interest in keeping the U.S. dependent on oil is bankrolling the loudest voices opposing any sensible response to the Climate Crisis, which would involve ending dependence on oil.

But even that may not matter in terms of the character of the future. Despite the noise over some insignificant errors, and the built-in uncertainty of details, the larger conclusions of the Climate Crisis are so solid the Pentagon is planning for them. The change I detect is the growing concern is that it's too late to stop the Climate Crisis from having significant consequences--so significant and for such a long time, that the second half of this century will look nothing like now, and that will just be the beginning.

I'm reading David Orr's new book, and it looks to be the beginning of a new consensus. The effects so far (mostly running way ahead of predictions) suggest that the effects of the greenhouse gas pollution of the past 70 years will be devastating. The subtitle of Orr's book is "Confronting Climate Collapse." The subtitle of Bill McKibben's forthcoming book this spring is "Making A Life on a Tough New Planet."

Scientists and others began talking about the potential for devastating global heating in the 60s. Arthur C. Clarke told Arthur Miller back then that it threatened the future. We've known enough about climate change to do something about it since the 70s, and scientists put together proposals for President Carter, but nothing was done. We could have acted then, or even in the 80s, and maybe avoided what's going to happen. Maybe even in the 90s, when Al Gore was vice president. Maybe even if the 2000 election hadn't been stolen. But it didn't happen, and now it's probably too late to prevent a civilization-straining change in the climate that will make the planet we know only a memory.

It's still important to cut back climate deforming pollution, to prevent even worse consequences further in the future. But it looks increasingly to me that the smartest people are looking beyond the present, to figure out how to deal with the very great changes coming in the future.

I expect my own attention to be moving in that direction as well. But that's a matter of emphasis, because that's always been a concern of this site--its premise in fact. It is about "dreaming up"--that is, "dreaming up" ideas, using the imagination--to counter the "downward bound" movement of events.

Part of that "dreaming up" is the activity of hope, an act first of all of the imagination, and Zinn's words are particularly appropriate. In a way, I'm going through the stages of mourning for our civilization, and I guess I've passed denial. So I am not optimistic. But I choose hope. I don't believe a future smoothly continuous with the present is going to happen. So the task now is to evaluate and create what will help the future the most, and work that hope now. It becomes the meaning of the present.