But the Worst Part...

Pretty grim news today. Since the early 70s, the human species, has caused a 60% drop in the population of all other terrestrial species. And we have bumped that loss from 50% to 60% over just the past four years.

Bad, bad, bad, f#@king awful, a living nightmare but that's not the worst part. The worst part is there's nothing you can do to stop it. The people who are running the show, the people who could at least respond to this, our monarchs and our presidents and our prime ministers, aren't interested. They're still chanting the mantra of perpetual exponential growth, the contagion that brought us to this abyss.

The people who could respond to this won't. They're intent on making this plainly existential threat considerably worse. The ecosystem is coughing its lungs out and their response is to go from a two pack a day habit to three.

By sheer happenstance I wrote this yesterday:

Today, Hedges called for an overthrow of the existing order: 

"Our only hope is to organize the overthrow of the corporate state that vomited up Trump. Our democratic institutions, including the legislative bodies, the courts and the media, are hostage to corporate power. They are no longer democratic. We must, like liberation movements of the past, engage in acts of sustained mass civil disobedience and non-cooperation. ...If we fail to embrace this militancy, which alone has the ability to destroy cult leaders, we will continue the march toward tyranny." 

In mid-month, George Monbiot called for a people's rebellion because, 

"Our politicians, under the influence of big business, have failed us. As they take the planet to the brink, it’s time for disruptive, nonviolent disobedience." 

"This preparedness for sacrifice, a long history of political and religious revolt suggests, is essential to motivate and mobilise people to join an existential struggle. It is among such people that you find the public and civic sense now lacking in government. That we have to take such drastic action to defend the common realm shows how badly we have been abandoned." 

More recently, Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, joined more than 90 other leading British academics in calling for mass civil disobedience: 

"When a government wilfully abrogates its responsibility to protect its citizens from harm and to secure the future for generations to come, it has failed in its most essential duty of stewardship. The “social contract” has been broken, and it is therefore not only our right, but our moral duty to bypass the government’s inaction and flagrant dereliction of duty, and to rebel to defend life itself." 

These are not wild-eyed revolutionaries. They're not crazed anarchists. They all speak of the abandonment of the public welfare by a political caste that has chosen, instead, to throw in with the corporate sector to our and our children's mortal detriment.

As the Archbishop and his colleagues put it, when your government wilfully abrogates its responsibility to protect its citizens from harm and to secure the future for generations to come, it is not only your right but your moral duty to bypass your government's inaction and flagrant dereliction of duty, and to rebel to defend life itself.

They are the worst part as they gather in their caucus rooms in our Parliament and our legislatures and abrogate their responsibility to protect us and especially the generations that follow us. They're the very worst part.

But what if we do have a moral duty to rebel to defend life itself, what does that even mean? What are we supposed to do? Who, how, where, when? I don't have a clue.