The Cost of Not Caring

I follow politics to a degree that is probably pathological. Some of my earliest memories are the elections of Kim Campbell and Jean Chretien. I’ve voted in every election, by-election, and referendum I’ve been eligible for. I follow five news sources...three Canadian, one from an allied country, and one from a rival country. I read books and blogs and reports and bills and initiatives.

When I was canvassing last year I was astonished by how many people told me they don’t follow politics. Some of it was probably just politeness, if they knew they disagreed with me. But the majority of them had no answers to my questions and had no questions of their own. The whole experience was utterly foreign to me.

When I got a radio license they told me I couldn’t talk about politics on the air. I had no idea what else there was to talk about. I have no idea how to talk about the weather without mentioning climate change, or talk about television without mentioning representation, or talk about traffic without mentioning public transit.

There is politics underlying everything if you pay attention to causes and effects. Until last year I didn’t realize just how little consideration people give to the consequences of their decisions, how little thought goes into even something as important as voting.

The main mistake the Democrats made in this election was nominating a stable candidate. It’s the mistake that Tom Mulcair made last year, promising slow incremental improvement and losing to the candidate who promised a clean sweep. In the Canadian election it turned out to be all empty promises and there has been little change in government policies with a year of the new administration. It’s impossible to say whether that will be the case in the US… as I said yesterday, since Trump has no track record beyond his campaign promises, we can’t know what he will do. The one thing we can be sure of is that when Congress votes to repeal Obamacare for the hundredth time, he won’t veto it the way Obama always had.

So he promised change, and people voted for change. They will be falling all over themselves to tell you that they didn’t vote because of bigotry, just a desire for change. I’m not sexist. I’m not homophobic. I’m not racist… why, some of my best friends are races. There are certainly people out there who are overtly bigoted, the ones who are at the moment painting swastikas on black churches, tearing hijabs off, assaulting women, and shooting protesters. I don’t know what proportion of Trump supporters are like this, but it can’t be all of them. Probably a majority have never considered such things.

The problem with this is that intentions are not magic. To quote a cheesy movie, “It’s not who you are inside, but what you do, that defines you.”

This week millions of moderate Americans, and center-right Americans, have voted for someone who promised to strip health care from 20 million people, because it was a change. They will say they have no bias against the sick but they have acted to hurt the sick because they just don’t care about the sick.

They have voted for a candidate who overtly discriminates against black people, who doesn’t want them to live in his building projects, who is on record stating he thinks they are inferior. The very definition of a white supremacist. They will say they are not racist, but through their actions they will cause untold devastation to racial minorities, because they just didn’t care. Not caring about racism is in itself racism.

They have voted for a molester… can you believe it? They have voted for a molester. Women have voted for a molester. We have to worry about the safety of children on the White House tour, and they will say it is because they wanted change. Whatever their intentions they have voted against women’s autonomy over their own bodies, and if their actions are sexist than we cannot say they aren’t sexist themselves, no matter what their excuse.

So many people this year just didn’t care. There is a cost of caring, a cost in time and stress, and they chose not to pay it. But sometimes the cost of not caring is greater, and unless you care enough to try to understand you will not know when that greater cost is due.

Things Fall Apart

This has not been a very good year all around. I mean, it’s been great for me, personally… better job, better pay, closer friends, et cetera. But it has been a disaster for the world. Climate change continues unchecked, the civil war in Syria is unabated, the flow of refugees out of Syria has triggered a rise in far-right nationalism throughout Europe, the great experiment of the EU is threatened with dissolution.

All these can be traced relatively simply from one to the next. It’s more difficult to make predictions, of course, but there’s a straightforward cause and effect progression.

It’s more difficult to unravel just what happened in the United States this week, and impossible to make reliable predictions for the future there. The election of a far-right demagogue with no political record leaves us relying only on his campaign promises for information. Said promises were made in a vacuum, without knowing how any of them could be accomplished, without knowing or caring what the powers of the presidency are, without knowing any facts of the present situation, and certainly without knowing that the potential consequences of them could be.

Well then, the deed is done. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere. Americans awakened Wednesday morning to a great uncertainty. It might be a disaster, like the Brexit vote in the UK. It might be a catastrophe, like the election of the Golden Dawn in Greece. It might be an apocalypse, like the elections of fascists in the 1930s.

Frankly it could be worse than that… Mussolini never had nuclear weapons, killer robots, or anything approaching the modern surveillance apparatus.

And of course, it would be remiss not to say that it could be more of the same. Trump has promised bombing campaigns, mass deportations, oil pipelines, stripping health funding, violently crushing protests, and turning back refugees. These are of course all things the US has engaged in for decades. Same song, second verse, a little bit louder and a little bit worse.

That’s the best case scenario. It’s a best case scenario that will result in millions of deaths around the world, hundreds of thousands in the US. It’s reset the most optimistic global warming predictions from 2° to 3°.

I now have no idea whether we will get the best case world on fire or the worst case nuclear winter. You don’t know either. The Washington press corps has no idea, the Speaker of the House has no idea, the Vice President has no idea.

Ultimately I suspect the Trump has no idea either. The man doesn’t seem to be real big on forethought and advance planning. There are conspiracy theories that his whole public persona was a cynical invention to get elected, but he has changed little over the past two years, even over the past decades. If Trump presses the button it will be at the spur of the moment.

If we don’t know what Trump will do we have still less knowledge of what people might do to stop him. I’ll try to cover that in a future post.