Imagine If We Decided Not to Lose. Imagine If We Decided to Fight Back.

We're at war. It's a war you sense more than feel. You read about it almost every day and most reports are very discouraging. We seem to be losing.

It's a war on many fronts - social, political, economic, environmental. It's a war for our survival and at stake are our people, our society, our culture, our civilization, perhaps even our existence. It's an "all in" war.  Oddly enough, with so much, everything, at stake we choose to be bystanders, to watch from the sidelines, to argue and grumble and do next to nothing.

We're conditioned, tamed, whipped. Ours is a learned and nurtured docility. We have been taught so many things that we are intellectually addled, unable to discern fact from fiction, fact from belief.

We have been taught to want without need. For many the greatest delight on Christmas morning is to find under the tree something that didn't even exist last year, the latest and greatest something, that, by its invention, manufacture and marketing consigns the last great thing to obsolescence. Who wants an iPhone 5 when there are iPhone 8s to be had?

I took some electronics to the recycling depot the other day. My discards had, to my dismay, gone on the fritz. Some component broke down that was nowhere to be had. The manufacturers no longer supported products of such vintage and seemed annoyed that I even asked. I even found a capable repairman (talk about an endangered species) but he was powerless to help. At the recycling yard I spoke with a worker about pallets of shrink-wrapped flatscreen TVs and other electronics that were awaiting a truck to some other destination. He told me that once, for an experiment, he and his co-workers took one load, plugged the stuff in and found that most of it still worked. The owners wanted something better, something newer. Want without need.

Few may realize it but that is a war we're losing, the war of over-consumption. We know that humankind is using the Earth's resources at 1.7 times the rate the planet can replenish them. We're running at 1.7 times the Earth's carrying capacity and that number worsens every year. We're depleting our planet's life-sustaining resources to feed our insatiable appetite for crap.

The real curse of that 1.7 times factor is our sheer and mortal dependency on it. We are dependent on more resources than the planet can furnish. As humankind grows in numbers, grows in reach and swells at the beltline we've become the civilizational equivalent of a back-alley heroin junky.

The environment. There's another front where we're taking a pounding. Fortunately and unfortunately, most of us are REMFs, a pejorative Vietnam war acronym for "rear echelon mother-f#@kers", the guys who fought the war from the air-conditioned comfort of some supply hangar.
We're REMFs. We're not at the really ugly end of climate change, at least not yet. That's for little people of dusky hue. For the time being we get to be bystanders - oblivious, indifferent bystanders - socially concerned but not really willing to sacrifice to any significant degree. We even recoil angrily at the idea of having to pay a few cents more for a litre of gasoline.

REMFs

Our wants cannot be restrained. We will fight, fang and claw, for ever more of steadily less. We will squeeze blood from this orbital rock. We've taken everything bequeathed us by our parents and grandparents. We added to that everything our technology and enterprise could deliver. And then we topped it all off by wanton, unrepentant plundering of our children's and grandchildren's future. We did everything "because we could" with no regard to "whether we should." Our larceny was always out of sight/out of mind.

How did we steal from our grandkids? You could begin by asking Edmund Burke or Theodore Roosevelt, both fine conservatives.  Both men wrote of every generation's fundamental and solemn responsibility to leave the world a better place for their heirs and successors. Our iteration of humanity, particularly the generations that comprise the era of neoliberalism, have chosen not to do that. To use Roosevelt's words, we have opted to "skin the earth." We have fouled this place - earth, sea and air - and have relentlessly depleted it without the slightest regard for those who will have to bear the burdens of our profligacy.

A new report from the Credit Suisse research institute stands as a damning indictment of the neoliberal order.  The study found that wealth grew in the first half of 2017 by 6.4 per cent and even outpaced population growth. Despite this abundant wealth, millennials will face the worst inequality of any generation yet.

In an economic climate where the top 1% own half the world’s wealth, a new analysis by Credit Suisse suggests that millennials in several advanced economies are likely going to face the worst income inequality of any generation in recent memory. The report, which focuses on the US, Germany, France, and Spain, shows that millennials are generally saddled with more student debt, less inherited money, and stricter mortgages than previous generations. At the same time, a lucky few are set to become spectacularly wealthy, widening the already large gap between rich and poor. Why?

...

While millennials who go into high-demand fields, like tech and finance, reap the rewards of an expensive education, many earn no more than their parents, and at a higher price. Analysis of Federal Reserve data by the group Young Invincibles shows that the median millennial household earns around $40,500, 20% less than boomers at the same point in their lifetimes.

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In the US, France, and Germany, only 10-15% of people in their twenties and thirties have inherited wealth. While it’s possible some will come into wealth later on (by 70, 30% to 40% of adults have inherited some wealth in these countries), survey data from Credit Suisse suggests that no more than 50% of any generation inherits during their lifetimes.

The millennials that have already inherited money, however, have inherited a lot. People from the US, France, Spain, and Germany who inherited wealth in their thirties reported that it made up 40% of their total assets. In the future, millennials will likely receive substantial amounts, as their parents’ generation has experienced healthy gains from a strong stock market and, of late, high house prices.

This boon will come as the US is planning to roll back estate taxes, reinforcing disparities in income.

So we're skinning future generations economically but they too will be the first generations to pay for our destruction of the environment. That's already coming home to roost in the poorest and most vulnerable regions of the planet but it will be here in due course.

Imagine if, as a society, we resolved not to let this happen, not to permit the economic and environmental devastation of our future generations. Imagine if we found the courage to rouse ourselves from this lethal torpor. Imagine if we decided to fight back and tried to win at least part of this war. What would that even look like? Let that thought rattle around in your mind for a while.

I can obviously speak only for myself but, to me, it would look revolutionary. Ask yourself this. Can you see any way for us to get out from under neoliberalism that doesn't arise from either collapse or revolt? Can you see a culture of groomed bystanders winning the day?

I can see this neoliberal contagion ending in collapse or revolt and I'm realistic enough to understand that collapse is the default option and very much the odds on bet. There's no guarantee that even revolt, if such a thing were possible, could set things right at this point but isn't it worse not to at least have tried?