Why do we worry about anything besides the Climate Crisis?

The world is ending.

That’s an exaggeration, but only by a little. The world as we know it is ending. Organized human society is ending. The climate is becoming more erratic and dangerous. Deadly fires and storms are increasing in size and frequency. The food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe are all growing progressively more toxic. Capitalist industry has poisoned the Earth and made it so that it will not be habitable for much longer.

This will not be an immediate end of the world, a single definitive armageddon moment. Our extinction will be gradual, much as our destruction of the environment has been. We’re like frogs in a slowly boiling pot, into which someone is also occasionally dropping cupfuls of acid and firing rounds of buckshot.

Given the insidious nature of our species’ demise, it’s not a top-of-mind issue for most, even many, people. But it damn well should be.

There is literally no more important issue, no greater emergency that humankind has ever faced. Yet we are perpetually consumed by petty shit. Even the most serious and important things are made the pettiest of shits by comparison.

There are obvious examples of things not worth the time they’re given by oversensitive assholes with excess insecurities, motivations for power, and axes to grind. People who work to pass legislation determining who can use what bathroom or what kind of outfit they have to wear when reading to children are among the lowest scum, trying to make the limited time that we have left on this planet more unpleasant for a minority of people.

There are plenty of even pettier things, of even less consequence that people waste their time and energy on. Any time I get angry at a video game or a book or some dickhead that calls me at work and is rude from the first word, I have to remind myself, we’re all going to die. Apart from the old truism that everyone alive will of course eventually die, as individuals, it is now within sight, the existential inevitability that we as a species will all die.

Looking at life from that perspective, one could argue that literally nothing matters. Racism, economic inequality, sexual violence, war, the most serious issues that plague us as a society are ultimately inconsequential from that doomed existentialist view. Issues of human rights, truth, decency, justice, the most basic and important things, don’t really matter. I sometimes wonder why I get so worked up about those and other things, when there is but one thing above it all, which renders it all petty and meaningless by comparison.

What is the point of giving our time and attention to anything when we know what’s coming, that it will all be rendered moot?

The simple answer is because it hasn’t all ended yet. There is no more pressing existential emergency than the climate crisis and all its accompanying horrors. Crushing as knowing that may be, we should carry it with us, and push those with the power to do something about it to goddamn fucking do it. Politicians and media personalities should be focusing on virtually nothing else. Frankly, it should be all they worry about, so that it can be fixed, and the petty shit can be left to us.