Dead Planet Blues: What’s a Poor Working Person to Do?
Tens of thousands participated in last weekend’s March to End Fossil Fuels in NYC - did it matter? Photos by Joe Maniscalco
By Joe Maniscalco
One night, just before Halloween, Rachel Rivera heard an alarming crack come from her 4-year-old daughter’s bedroom. She immediately raced in, scooped up the child in her arms and got out quick — right before the ceiling fell in on their Brooklyn apartment. Hurricane Sandy killed some 50 New Yorkers in 2012. Rivera and her daughter Marisol just missed being counted among the deceased.
“Imagine evacuating from your home losing everything in a single night,” the Brownsville mom and community activist told those gathered ahead of this weekend’s March to End Fossil Fuels in New York City. “All I had on were shorts and a T-shirt; Marisol was in her pajamas and the blanket she was sleeping in.”
I can relate. Like Rivera, I, too, lost everything that mattered to me in Hurricane Sandy…“family heirlooms….pictures I can never get back.”
But the more than a decade of pestilence, riots, wildfires, mass shootings, and all the rest of it that’s happened since Superstorm Sandy tore through the Atlantic coast could not have made us more ill-prepared than we are now to do anything about the next weather-related catastrophe.
The tens of thousands of who took part in the March to End Fossil fuels on Sept. 17 are still calling on President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency and ban his billionaire donors from drilling for more oil.
Hurricane Sandy survivor Rachel Rivera.
“We are so clearly in a fucking climate emergency,” a very frustrated NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus declared at this weekend’s march. “Why won’t President Biden declare it? I feel so gaslit that it’s insane.”
UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Vanessa Nakate from Uganda talked about how the climate crisis is not some far off future threat and that, in fact, millions in the Horn of Africa today are living on the brink of starvation because of drought.
“Enough is enough,” Nakate said. “We cannot eat coal, we cannot drink oil, and we cannot have any new fossil fuel investments.”
NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus.
Not to worry though, the Presidnt of the United States of America has since responded with lots of reassuring talk about how climate chaos is “even more frightening than nuclear war” plus a cockamamie plan to train 20,000 young Americans to fight it.
Corporate media was quick to liken Joe’s scheme to some kind of New Deal.
It’s all a sick and twisted show. Joe Biden is not gonna stop drilling — neither will Donald Trump, and neither will anyone else who the corporate establishment ultimately selects to become the next “Commander-In-Chief” in 2024.
“There is no politics on a dead planet,” Kalmus rightly said. “There is no economy on a dead planet. There’s no democracy on a dead planet.”
Center for Popular Democracy Co-Director Analilia Mejia.
The obvious problem, of course, is there’s no democracy on this planet right now — at least not in the U.S. Joe Biden does not work for us, and neither does anyone else in office holding onto a “D” or “R” in front of their name.
“We are the revolution,” Congress Member Jamal Bowman [D-NY] said when his turn at the podium came. “It’s going to be our love, our heart, our vision that rebuilds America and saves it from itself. This is not just about saving our democracy, this is not just about saving our humanity — this is about saving the only planet we call home.”
That all sounded well and good and, in fact, appeared to have resonated with a lot of the younger people at the March to End Fossil Fuels it was aimed at.
U.S. Representative Jamaal Bowman.
But then the congressman couldn’t stop, invoked “The Squad” — Congress Members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [D-NY], Ilhan Omar [D-MN], Ayanna Pressley [D-MA], et al. — as some kind of counterforce to those “continuing to operate under the corporate power regime” — and ended on a mighty, “We are going to do everything in our power…,” etc.
And so, yeah, lost the mojo he’d managed to conjure up.
“As a mother, as a daughter, as a human,” Center for Popular Democracy Co-Director Analilia Mejia said next, “I am li-vid at the… 'We practically announced’… 'We doing our best.’”
Mejia, continued, “Now I am, I will admit, I'm a Democrat — Democratic Socialist. But I am disappointed at my leader and my party — and my people who would rather capitulate to money over people, over my children, over you, over my mom, over my dad — over those whose future we put in peril today,”
A restrained Susan Sarandon demurely suggested those in power should maybe…“push a little harder.”
UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Vanessa Nakate.
“Let’s get something done before it’s time to vote,” the actor and activist continued. “Let’s not wait until after it’s time to vote. Let’s demand that if they want our votes — show us something.”
Participants at this weekend’s march also carried signs touting a “Just Transition Ahead.” But rank and file trade unionists have never bought into the idea — they know damn well this system as designed isn’t offering anybody any job guarantees. Maybe that’s why this weekend’s revolutionary march to save the planet from climate catastrophe lacked any significant presence from the greatest counterforce to corporate dominance working people have ever had in this country — organized labor.
There’s so much media propaganda and narrative management happening today that most working people struggle to know which way is up. According to the Pew Research Center, just 31 percent of American adults actually believe we should completely phase out oil, coal and natural gas.
Organized labor had a light presence at this weekend’s March to End Fossil Fuels.
When asked about those who view climate change as just another dynamic part of the earth’s natural cycle Kalmus said, “They’re just wrong.”
Rivera’s daughter is now 18, but narrowly skirting death as a preschooler has a way of sticking with you.
“When it rains she’ll come to me and say, ‘Mom, are we going to die?”, Rivera told climate marchers. “I can no longer lie to her — I do not know what’s gonna happen. None of us know what’s gonna happen.”