Our lives on social media are damaged ones. Scroll through Facebook or Twitter on any given day and you'll see four, five, even six or more headlines warning about the impending doom of climate change:
CBS: "It turns out climate change could be bad"
CNN: "What it's like at the ground zero of climate change"
MSNBC: "Why Trump should focus on climate change if he wants to stop immigrants"
Buzzfeed: "23 reasons why we need to stop freaking out over climate change"
Bite your lip, chew on your nails, or grind your teeth. From boringly obvious to painstaking denial, these headlines incite slow and agonizing anxiety.
The prospect of what our world will look like in one hundred years is absolutely dreadful. Any rational person without their head up their ass is bound to fear the impending climate catastrophe. The catch 22 of late capitalism is that information about the apocalypse is increasingly at our fingertips, but we feel powerless to do anything about it. It's like a toddler who wants something, but doesn't know how to communicate it using words. Frustration boils over into tears. For us, frustration burrows deeper into our unconscious.
Our age is one of the return of the repressed. Apocalyptic movies, TV series, and video games are churned out like indistinguishable replicas. Netflix's Black Summer, HBO's Chernobyl, and even Hulu's Handmaid's Tale offer only a temporary escape from our very real concerns about capitalism's destruction of the environment.
Climate grief is real. More specifically, the National Center for Biotechnology Information defines this as Solastalgia: "...the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment." I'll spare you the data, but is there anything we can do about it? The American Psychological Association thinks so. In 2017, they wrote a 69 page guide for dealing with the trauma of climate change. In it, the authors advocate "building resilience," which they define as "... the ability of a person (or community) to cope with, grow through, and transcend adversity." Take a deep breath, push your climate emotions deep down inside, and keep on keeping on.
Repression is unhealthy. You don't need Freud to tell you that. But the half-baked solutions to climate change that our politicians propose induce a familiar remedy: anger. The Green New Deal is better than nothing, but the bleak prospects of striking a deal with the mad emperors of capitalism doesn't alleviate our distress. Catharsis comes in the form of passionate rage. "The last must become the first," as Franz Fanon said of the earth's wretched masses. Nothing less should be our demand. By declaring war on our very existence, our ruling class deserves whatever it gets. To paraphrase Alexander Cockburn: is your hate pure? Conciliation leaves nothing but anxiety when the end of history is in sight.
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