The Operational Question

 

I wake up. I wake up, and I am in a meeting. Was I daydreaming? Was I just distracted? I am in a meeting room with people talking about the climate crisis. I look around. I recognize these faces. I know these people. They know me too. What’s at stake is everything, but the conversation is once again about everything else. There is talk of movement building, some implicit agreement on system change, there is mention of care and regeneration, and some references to intersectional this and that. We developed such an obscure way of intellectualism that even ourselves cannot see our denialism. Now that I am awake, I realize why I had gotten distracted in the first place. I look around. Are we connected? Are we serious? What’s the plan?

We. Are. Not. Serious. We are fine, actually. It’s a lovely day, today. I have been thinking about in which city I should spend my retirement – you know, thirty years from now.

I look around. There is a mirror on the other side of the room. So when I look around, I see myself too.

We are atheist Jesus-waiters. We hope that someone else, a perfect redeemer, will come and do the thing that we know needs to be done. But we also don’t believe in that someone else. We know that no one is perfect, so no one is the redeemer, but only a redeemer is allowed to dare to do the thing.

We are not thinking of ourselves as the president of the central bank (Che Guevara’s job for more than a year in post-revolution Cuba) as something we would do after one revolution but a little before moving on to prepare another revolution. We are not Ches or Fidels or Lenins or Stalins. We are shy about power because we are afraid of responsibility. Currently, we are just fine. Nobody holds us accountable and we can just pretend to exist. If someone asks, we have our convoluted answers: without a large working class movement,… ; without an anticolonial approach embedded into our organizing, … ; in order to avoid activist burnout, … ; while rejecting fossil fuels, we shouldn’t fall into the mistake supporting extractivist green capitalism, and therefore… . We know why we are not taking risks. We know why we don’t dare. We are sure. We are sure because we are fine. We are fine because we are sure. We are absolutely fucking disconnected.

 

I wake up again. I am in a different meeting now. What just happened? Is this an ongoing dream? I recognize these faces too. It’s hard to understand the topic of the discussion… has to do with what the “people” value or prioritize or something. We are being realists again. Right after this talk, there will be some smart objectives and activity plans, and a division of tasks where people will check their “availabilities” and “capacities”. I can’t bear remaining awake. What are we even talking about? I close my eyes.

I open my eyes. Now I am in a seminar which is conveniently labeled as a workshop. I occasionally try to genuinely comprehend what people are saying. This is one such moment. The speakers are long-time activists and organizers, they are nice and fine. The governments are sending us to 4 degree warming, they say, and the speakers have a complex, sophisticated and unreliable plan to send us to 3.95 degree warming. They are part of the lesser-evil spectrum. I look into their eyes. They look through me. I respond by looking through them. We are terrifyingly disconnected.

There is an operational question and we are spending most of our energies to avoid looking at it. It’s like a black hole pulling us, and we are orbiting around it with tremendous effort – in vain – to run away from it. It comes closer as we get closer to it, so it becomes harder and harder to avoid it.

There are, though, some special moments, when we are connected, and we look at it straight. It’s not about capitalism, it’s not about justice, it’s not about emissions – those are all on the event horizon, they are the visible, tangible parts of the black hole. When we look at it straight, it is an operational question that doesn’t allow for ambiguous answers. It sometimes wears a small girl’s body. Mine has Alan Kurdi’s smile, mostly. It asks: knowing everything that you know, what is your plan to keep us below 2 degrees warming? What are this week’s deliverables that are compatible with such a plan? What are in today’s to-do list according to that plan? What are your accountability procedures to keep you fucking connected to the meaning of the climate crisis?

It is hard to keep looking. So we divert our attention after a couple of minutes top. Then, we are fine again. It’s sunny today, the rains of last week were really good for agriculture, but it was such a nuisance for biking. Did you see that bananas are ten per cent cheaper in the supermarket this week? We should get some.