Shame, Sin, Sacrifice and Sanction

All these Ss have been rolling around in my head this week. Shame. Sin. Sacrifice. Sanction. (The most insistent S-word these days is "surreal," which is how the whole climate change scene of increasing urgency and zero action feels, but that's for another day.)

Many cultures around the world have crawled out from under the thumb of organized religion, but we've perhaps thrown the baby out with the holy water. Religion served some important purposes (putting judgement aside for the moment). Religion was keeper of the taboos, for example.

But taboos have all but disappeared in the western world of "get anything and do anything you want, whenever you want." Shame is rarely a successful tool anymore in helping people learn the difference between right and wrong. Sin has become a virtue. Sacrifice? Ha! And sanctions? Well, check out the unemployment rate of black South Africans ... apartheid never really disappeared, despite the campaign of economic sanctions.

So, would it be worthwhile, for the sake of the future of all children, to bring back shame, sin, sacrifice and sanction? Could we have some impact merely by bringing these concepts up in private and public conversations about climate change and its mitigation? You know, reintroducing them as valid ways to point our societies in the direction of zero carbon and doing what's right by our children.

As someone who pays attention when the natural world is trying to tell me something, I have to share that two pileated woodpeckers just flew by and started pecking at the trees outside my window. Message there? Keep hammering away at it! Any way we can.

Winston Churchill once said, "You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life."

He also said, "When you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack."

Yeah, "nice" doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere. Maybe it's time to start rubbing people's faces in their shameful displays of profligate and uncaring greenhouse gas emitting. Like ... "Hey, lady, you must be pretty ashamed of yourself, idling your car like that when there's absolutely no reason to. You're killing your grandchildren, you know!" Or ... "Dear Mr. Prime Minister, shame on you for being unwilling to sacrifice any fossil fuel profits at all to ensure your children and mine a viable future."

Shame, sin, sacrifice, sanction. Remember the woodpeckers. Let's start driving these ideas home!

63 Days - When Will Our Carbon Emissions Become Embarrassing?

I was reading my alumni newsletter yesterday when I stumbled upon a small note explaining that one of the professors had spent a lovely summer vacation in Paris and then cruising around the Mediterranean with her family.

I'm now at the point where my first reaction was not "Wow, how lovely." My first thought was, "They shouldn't be printing that here — advertising it as though it's something benign." (I live in Canada so it's no small feat to get to France.)

I had the same sort of reaction when a colleague told me that her toddler daughter was happy to go to a doctor who had the same name as her favourite character in her favourite movie: Cars. "Yikes," I thought to myself. "I wouldn't even allow my kids to watch a movie called Cars in this day and age."

And when, a few weeks ago, I was having to drive back and forth to the hospital each day due to complications with my broken ankle, I was embarrassed to be seen driving our son's (automatic) car because it's an SUV. But then I realized that no one else was looking at me with sanctioning eyes.

So, when are our carbon emissions going to start being frowned upon? Considered socially unacceptable? Gone the way of smoking? Looked upon with scorn? A source of embarrassment? Against social norms? Necessitating a good excuse?

We need to get to zero carbon emissions. The age of burning is over. When are we going to get over it?

107 Days - Ignorance is Blissful ... and Deadly (Is It Time for Sanctions?)

I feel as though I've stumbled into a parallel universe and am now looking at this world through a two-way mirror.

This sense of otherworldliness (or perhaps it's theatre of the absurd!) comes from knowing so much (some days it feels like too much) about the climate change crisis that is upon us, all the while watching so many people go about their daily lives as if nothing has changed.

When I do meet or hear from someone who "gets" what's happening to the biosphere, it's a bit of a surprise (albeit a pleasant one).

But it shouldn't be this way. We are so connected to the giant library we call the internet. They say that four billion people have cell phones - they can't be doing all that talking and not talking at all about climate change, can they? And bless them, the mainstream media are doing a better job of talking about the climate emergency than the vast majority of scientists and government leaders are. There ought to be more people talking about this issue.

But most, it seems, would rather be ignorant - and blissful. And dead (whether figuratively or literally).

Here's a real bugbear of mine: I reckon that if one has the technology and time to comment on an online article about the issue, then one has the technology and time to research the science of global warming and climate change. But I see so much ignorance there, too.

I used to think, "Oh, poor sods, they just aren't scientifically literate enough to understand." But for too long now, those of us who take the time to read what the scientists are discovering, and who have the compassion to note what is already happening due to climate disruption in other parts of the world, have refrained from criticizing the lazy and ignorant (stupid and selfish?) people who take the time to make unhelpful comments like the ones I read in online Comments sections.

Perhaps taking climate change into the "moral arena," as suggested by Al Gore (and others such as Tutu and Leape), could include social sanctions and moral outrage against those who continue to promote progenycide by sending in comments to online discussions of this issue that are out-of-date, ignorant of the science, and completely without empathy for present and future victims of climate breakdown.

Indeed, where is the moral outrage surrounding this most disastrous of messes our leaders have ever got us into? Why do we cry for inquiries into tiny, inconsequential scandals about sex or money (or sex and money) but remain mute to the complete bungling of the climate change emergency?

Why is there no sanctioning happening? Are we that afraid that we would have to sanction ourselves in the process?