An Unsurprising Surprise (Coping With Nasty Weather)

There are two kinds of surprises in life, I suppose.  The first kind is the sudden event that no one could have foreseen, and the second is the sudden event that could have been foreseen by anyone with decent situational awareness.  Of course, the greater a person's situational awareness, the greater the proportion of events which the person can put into the second category of surprises.  Take lightning, for instance.  Anyone who is outdoors during a thunderstorm should know that he or she can be struck.  But sometimes lightning can strike out of a clear blue sky.  Before the advent of radar and satellite weather imagery, such events could be considered a genuine surprise.  Today, not so much.

Anyone who has watched the political climate in the world and particularly in the United States can see that we have been having some stormy weather.  The latest instance of this is the savage hammer attack against the husband of Nancy Pelosi by David Depape, a 42 year old male drug user aligned with QAnon, anti-Semitism, and right-wing conspiracy theories.  While shocking, such events as this are hardly surprising.  Unfortunately we live in a political climate which has been engineered to produce just such events.  Those who did the engineering are those defenders of white supremacy who are genuinely terrified at the prospect of the emergence of a world which they will have to share on an equal footing with all the other people in the world.  These people were energized into action by the gains of the American civil rights struggle of the 1960's, and have been working tirelessly ever since to roll back those gains.  Their energies were kicked into overdrive by the presidency of Barack Obama, as white supremacists vowed to themselves that they would create a world in which such power-sharing could never happen again.  

We know the result of their efforts.  Under Donald Trump, we got an acceleration of the social and environmental diseases which are typical of Republican, conservative governance: an increase of mass shootings due to easy access to guns, an increase in wealth and income inequality, a shredding of social safety nets, an acceleration of climate change (including life-threatening wildfires on a massive scale), a cannibalizing of government, an increase in persecution, oppression, and outright murder of people of color, and an increasing destruction of the ability of the United States to make large-scale coordinated responses to large-scale emergent threats.  This is why in 2020, so many nonwhite nations in the developing world were so much better than the United States in their response to COVID-19.  

Now the Republican Party is continuing to field political candidates who are nutcases.  We should not be surprised by the political violence we are seeing when we also see these nutcases openly calling for physical violence.  (See this, this, and this also.)  And the Republicans are trying to win elections by their usual strategy of lying.  They say that America is being swept by a dangerous crime wave under the Democrats, even though there is no evidence of this.  (In the city where I live, there are candidates for City Council who are trying to say that our city is suffering increased crime.  If that's the case, I haven't noticed.)  They say that the American economy is suffering under the Democrats.  However, this statement is refuted by the findings of institutions such as the Brookings Institute and the Center for American Progress.  They blame President Biden for the high gas prices we have seen across the United States in 2022.  However, their blame is dishonest, as the reality is that even without the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, global oil production cannot expand further.  In fact, Saudi Arabian oil production is either very near or at its peak.  And if we buy Russian oil, we finance the evil deeds of a would-be emperor, a dictator and murderer named Vladimir Putin.  The high price of gasoline (petrol for those who are British) should be seen as yet one more proof that the world is going to have to change its way of living very soon.

It could be asked how we who have been historically oppressed let ourselves fall into such a dangerous situation in which an organized group of narcissistic, fascist, supremacist oppressors could become such a threat to the rest of us.  Why, for instance, did we not organize ourselves for our own collective good to build our own nonviolent power?  Why was so much time wasted?  Why did we not create strategies to effectively deal with the increasing concentration of power - media power especially! - which took place from 1980 onward?  Fox News should never have been allowed to become such a powerful cult.  But asking such questions at such a time as this seems almost like asking too late - as if we were a party of golfers who had continued our play even as storm clouds gathered and we found ourselves stricken down by a bolt from heaven, a bolt we should have foreseen, and now those of us who survived were asking ourselves why we had been struck.  A more urgent question is the question of what we should do now.

I myself don't entirely know the answer to that question.  But I do have the following suggestions.

• First, have the right world-view.  According to the world-view which I hold, we live in a moral universe ruled by a righteous Creator who has promised that the soul that sins shall die (Ezekiel 18:4) , that everyone who exalts himself will be humbled (Matthew 23:12), that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), that whatever a man sows, this he will also reap (Galatians 6:7), that those who make themselves great by destroying or oppressing their fellow human beings will themselves ultimately be destroyed (James 5:1-6).  This is why I am confident that those who violently push white supremacy will ultimately fail.  Even now, I see the outworkings of damnation propagating through these people.  Some signs of this propagation I cannot reveal now - although those who read sociological analyses of American society can spot the trends.  Even secular sociologists and economists have lately noticed how those who pursue certain goals are  frequently destroyed by the very means they use to pursue those goals.
• Second, focus on building your own internal power so that you may reduce your dependence on the dominant society.  I am thinking of a passage from Recovering Nonviolent History by Maciej Bartkowski.  (Disclaimer: I really like Dr. Bartkowski's book, but I don't anymore like the organization which Dr. Bartkowski belongs to, namely, the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict.  If you want to know why, please check out some of the links in the sidebar of this blog.)  Page 18 of his book contains the following quote: "...the guilt of falling into the predatory hands of [oppressors] lay in the oppressed society, and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility.  Victims and the seemingly disempowered are thus their own liberators as long as they pursue self-organization, self-attainment, and development of their communities."
• Third, and most important, maintain nonviolent discipline.  The filthiness of the Right has been made abundantly plain over the last several years.  This filthiness has become a powerful liability to them.  In order to remove this handicap, they have tried to claim that both they and their intended victims are filthy.  Do not give them any help in their attempt to blame both sides for a conflict which they themselves started.  By all means, vote.  However, no matter what happens afterward, do not answer the violence of the Right with your own violence.  Beware of engaging in protest marches, as these can be easily infiltrated by violent agents provocateurs from the Right.  Do not give these people any opening for casting blame on you.  Please do me a favor and read the posts I wrote on strategic nonviolent resistance under the heading "From Dictatorship to Democracy."