No, Climate Change DIDN’T Cause Maui Disaster!
But late-stage techno-capitalism very well might have.
Is any of this true?
You don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe someday we will.
And knowing will change nothing.
Unless you and I rise up and force it to mean something.
My level of optimism on that occurring, among enough of us, and in time, is not high.
See the lilies of the valley. They toil not, they spin not.
They have no more defense than we do, against the bulldozers and the bred-in civilized greed of billionaires and paupers alike, and helpless shrugs of oh well, whatcha gonna do abouuut it?
***
Everywhere you go now, they are ‘understaffed’, and it’s not because of Covid, or some sort of generational character flaw, or laziness.
They’re understaffed because money is all that matters anymore, and organizations are unwilling–even unable, sometimes–to part with enough of it to employ and retain good people under tolerable working conditions at a living wage or anything like it.
Private enterprise in this country has always expected to be able to work people to death and pay them nothing–a working definition of Slavery of course, but even if you believe that abolition happened, think of Ben Franklin beginning his illustrious career as an ‘apprentice’ to his brother the printer. For what amounted to three hots and a cot.
Child labor was widespread before ‘Labor’ organized and bled and starved and died to end it, and other abuses, temporarily. Shit like that is making quite a comeback and that’s the truth even if McDonald’s is now paying 14.50 an hour (for twenty-eight hours a week so that there is no health insurance).
Try it yourself, Mr. CEO
See how far five fifteen an hour will go
Take a part time job in one of your stores
I betcha can’t make it here any more
All aboard the hamster wheel. That’s the only way to really get loved, you know.
When I was 23, government saved my life. They gave me a bus pass and use of a primitive computer for writing up a resume’. With that boost, I got a job at the Multnomah County Library in downtown Portland.
With the insurance the job brought, I finally got the worst of my medical issues addressed, for pennies, instead of the hundreds of thousands of dollars it would be today.
With the paycheck I got a studio apartment. Steam heat. Two hundred a month, in Northwest Portland a block from the Quality Pie, in an area that is now gentrified beyond all human reason.
I went back to school, taking out loans for education, and forty years later there is still eleven thousand dollars of that left to pay. Uncle Joe will start wanting that money again come the falling of the leaves. I will become one of the 150,000 Americans whose Social Security checks, for god’s sake, are garnished for school debt.
None of that is the point.
The point is that there were a couple dozen of us shelving books at that library. Far more than were needed. You might have derided half of us as shovel-leaners and your scorn would have been partly deserved, but …
The fucking books got shelved proper, no matter what.
There was still such a thing as a Fire Lookout then. Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder both spent summers in high towers, scanning the horizon for flames, with enough time left over to produce great art, and enough money left over to eat well and take the bus home.
But fire lookouts are not cost-effective.
We can send up a satellite. We can do it with drones. To hell with the shovel-leaners. They can join the Air Force, or join the Corps.
On Maui, cameras captured in vivid detail the moments when the technology exploded and showered the dry forest with molten metal shards.
But no one was being paid to watch it happen. So no one did.
No one was even dozing in front of a screen in the middle of the night.
No one was being paid to walk the earth and do regular maintenance on the ailing grid.
No reason to waste money on that. What’s the worst that could happen?
It wasn’t climate change, in point of fact, that burned down Lahaina and killed all those people.
It was capitalism, reaching its tentacles into the public utilities, and the schools, and the libraries too.
It was hatred for the idea that someone might be getting away with something, by doing an easy job that left time to think while still actually paying the bills.
While we, the righteous, spun our hamster wheels faster and faster and tried to get
A head.