The real power shift

(2/27/09)

I’ve recently awoken and downed a cup of Starbucks’ coffee out of a Styrofoam cup on an airplane. I’m headed to Washington D.C. to be 1/11,000th of a crowd of mostly young folks congregating to talk about climate change. The irony is not lost on me.

I’m surrounded by men and their smells. Three men in front of me, one on either side, three behind me. One smells of sweat, one of old age, and another has the kind of gas and halitosis that can only be the result of a lack of sleep or an illness. There is also a hint of 8:00 am airport lounge gin martini. I haven’t decided which male is responsible for each of the myriad odors, but have instead been letting my sleepiness use my nose as a guide into dreams, the kind that are taffy-stretchy versions of real memories. Guided by this smell, these dreams, this nose of mine, I remember sweaty unemployed afternoons with a certain man.

My head has been lolling around awkwardly regardless of my travel pillow shaped like a cute, soft toilet seat. The bag of trail mix I bought at the airport is mostly sugar. I can’t stop myself from thinking about how huge my carbon footprint is with my current lifestyle, even though I walk to work every day. And after all this time, having worked on both individual solutions to the environmental crisis & systemic solutions . . . after all this time, I’m feeling more and more like throwing my hands up in the air in despair, running somewhere, running long enough that I find that patch of dirt that will beckon me, then sowing seeds and taking a pen in my hand and living life as though “problem” was an imaginary word and “money” was as well.

Maybe this particular episode was triggered by the Economist. I always buy the current issue when I travel, partly because it’s informative and readable, and the only time I have attention span enough to read a magazine cover-to-cover is on a plane, and partly because I think it makes me look smart.

And in one segment on the crashing global economy a reference was made to another article in the issue focused on the millions of Chinese who left the cities to go to the countryside in January of this year for the new year, and the staggering amount who didn’t bother returning. I look forward to reading the full article. I know poverty is no joke, but I can’t help but delight a little bit at all the closed toy factories that must be collecting dust, waiting for an urban kid who happened to get a hold of a camera to break in one night and make art of its eeriness, and maybe make out with his boyfriend in a safe and novel place, too.

Yes, I am often choosing delight in these uncertain times. Try it, say out loud, “crashing global economy.” I guarantee a little spasm of giddiness if you are anything like me. And of course, we can sober it up, too, where appropriate. Say, out loud, “thousands of factories in Southern China are now abandoned. Their workers went home to the countryside for the new year in January. Millions never came back.” (Economist Feb. 21-27, 2009, p. 9)

So my only concern, my only real issue with this crash, this delicious, disobedient crash that has old white men who are used to obedience from the people and systems they thought they controlled sweating into their stinky collars and Italian suits, my only issue . . . is those Chinese workers. And the other workers all around the world. Yes, humans are resilient, but we’ve populated the world to such a degree (and made it so damn filthy) that I know that the widening poverty class will not have the option to slip back into idyllic countryside living – growing food and drinking water from a stream. There is and will continue to be growing disease and famine and death and destruction. And all that precious fucking money that the crooked bankers and all the other crooked old men are hoarding won’t be put to use in time. And it won’t be put to use where it can actually be helpful. No, it will rot in the clenched fists of those men while people starve and get dysentery and shoot each other and sell each other crack to survive. And when it finally gets so bad that their precious money is completely worthless, they won’t even be around to see it, those men with no resources but money (paper!) They will have long withered away, having lived empty existences capped off by crippling, devastating fear of who they have become and the untold and unnecessary sorrows they have inflicted on their brothers and sisters – their human family and this one unique earth. I almost don’t know who to feel more sorry for.