Is this the Summer 'Normal' Ended?
Staggering Our Way Through Another Wave of Pandemic Toward the Coming Climate Crisis
By Jim Miller
As we head into the dog days of summer slogging through heatwaves and a resurgent pandemic due to the Delta variant toward a potentially disastrous yet farcical recall election in California being played out with the second largest wildfire in state history as a background, it’s hard not to yearn for a return to “normalcy.”
Indeed, just as it seemed we might be edging our way out of the maelstrom of the Trump era and the daily dance of death toward a “summer of joy,” as some had prematurely labeled it, the facts we hate returned to spoil the party.
Despite the hordes of happy revelers in the Entertainment Districts of America, something big has changed and a few of our more astute pundits have noticed.
Some of it has to do with the pandemic and the powerful, irrational forces driving us back to overflowing emergency rooms in the red states. After decrying the lunacy of people with so much “blood on their hands” that they’ve forgotten it, Charles Blow bemoans in “Anti-Vax Insanity” that, “We have a situation in America where people are and will continue to die of ignorance and stubbornness. They are determined to prove they are right even if it puts them on the wrong side of a eulogy.”
Paul Krugman similarly notes in the New York Times that “Many of the attitudes that have characterized the right-wing response to the coronavirus pandemic—refusal to acknowledge facts, accusations that scientists are part of a vast liberal conspiracy, refusal to address the crisis—were foreshadowed in the climate debate.” From there he goes on to point out that what’s worse now is the American right is no longer cynically pandering to corporate interests but engaging in “aggressive, performative anti-rationality.”
All of this is true about the nature of the current derangement of the right-wing, but it seems to me that the problem is bigger than a simply partisan one. As awful as the Trumpian nihilists are, it is also the case that the “code red for humanity” represented by the most recent report released by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has failed to properly galvanize the much-lionized moderates in the Democratic Party who hold our future in their hands.
Rather than joining with their wiser colleagues and rushing toward a $3.5 trillion reconciliation package that might be our “last chance” to seriously address climate, folks like Joe Manchin, Kristin Sinema, and nine of their counterparts in the House are hand wringing about cost. Fiddling as the world burns (literally), one might say.
It’s also noteworthy that while the IPCC report has gotten significant attention in the mainstream media, it is not THE story. Perhaps I’m overreacting, but it is saving the world from apocalyptic outcomes we are talking about, not what will play well in the midterm elections. However, straightforwardly acknowledging that would mean giving up on the impulse to return to normal, forever.
It’s not a pleasant thought but reality has a funny way of crashing the party.
Mark Blyth in the Guardian observes that, “it’s time to give up on getting back to normal and face the fact that there is no normal to return to. As the IPCC report makes clear, there are now only unknown and unfamiliar futures that we can return from. Embracing that uncertainty, rather than denying it, is the first step to choosing the right one.”
And our new normal means living with Covid-19 in some form for the foreseeable future along with catastrophic fires, sea level rise, rolling extinction, and continued local, national, and global political instability fueled in part by performative rage at the facts we hate. Nobody wants to acknowledge this and that too is part of the new normal.
David Sirota bluntly sizes up where we are in his most recent Guardian piece:
As the IPCC report suggests, whether or not these Democrats follow through and force a climate confrontation in Congress – and whether or not their own constituents demand they hold out – could be the difference between a livable planet and a hellscape.
It’s the difference between Democrats in 10 years bragging, “That was me, people!” about rescuing the world from disaster, or hunkering down at their Martha’s Vineyard compounds after they’ve laid waste to the planet.
If we fail to come to terms with the uncertainty of our future, nobody knows precisely what will happen or exactly when. We just know it won’t be a return to normal and it won’t be good.