Shards of meaning and splinters of spring

My thoughts have been far from the day-to-day this year.

My mind is in books, the stories of four brothers in the vortex of pain in my parents’ generation or the never-real, ideal world of a boy and a marten on Mount Hood. My hands are painting the gleaming fir of new garden-bed posts in the sunshine that is far too early.

Image of pumpkin ridge and mount emily in northeaster oregon in early spring with a lone hiker visible - by arie Farnam

My mind gnaws at the fact that the spring is too early, that we scarcely had any snow, that whole nations are becoming climate refugees. But for us locally it still isn’t too much of a problem. Even the forest fires have struck mercifully elsewhere. My hands are filling the washing machine and turning the dial. My feet are tramping through the kitchen.

My mind is drowning in dying languages and resurrected tongues, in Wall Kimmerer’s desperate struggle to learn Potawatami from the nine remaining fluent speakers, in the legacies of Czech students in the 19th century studying at the feet of country codgers, of Hebrew rekindled with such hope and of St. Patrick burning the last rare books written by Irish Druids. My hands are cutting spaghetti squash and cooking meatballs or dribbling a basketball with my teenage boy.

I’m always listening to some audiobook, always trying to run fast enough to get to something that matters, always writing something while resigned that the chances of an unknown writer getting published these days are minuscule, always trying to reach my kids through the addictive fog of social media and video games, always trying to figure out what really matters.

All this, while my body is going to medical appointments, weeding the garden beds, washing the dishes, organizing transportation for my son and doing physical therapy exercises. My mind is like a restless toddler but one with sophisticated taste.

On a good day, my mind is drawing plot lines and character arcs for two new novels, weaving snippets of poetry in for one character and plant lore in for another. My hands are making flash cards for students an ocean away. Even my mouth and my face are speaking through the computer screen, the same trusty lessons I’ve been teaching for twenty years. Or my fingers and eyes are working over a medical study manuscript, editing for grammar, while my mind is gibbering in helpless fury over the news.

Since January, I’ve been writing down the important things in a date book—not the garden preparations, the dishes or even the tutoring of students but the insights in the books I’ve read, the plot holes and their solutions, my kids’ struggles and tiny triumphs, the news and my various epiphanies. I want to be connected to the day to-day-world, but my mind needs this nourishment and stimulation the way a seedling needs water and sun.

It stretches toward the light in one direction and reaches roots through the soil the opposite way. It can’t help it. No matter where I’m planted, my mind is an unquiet and seeking thing. The only things that truly quiet it are mountains, big sky, trees and an unhindered wind. Meditation every morning settles it some but only temporarily.

This is one reason that I’m going to graduate school, starting this summer. But I also worry because I have a lot more responsibilities and duties and needs and distractions than I did the last time I was in school—twenty-five years ago. I did well in school because there was endless time. I read very slowly because of my wiggle, wobbly eyes, but that didn’t seem to matter when there was nothing else but studying and reading in my days. Now it will be different.

I’ll soon have assigned reading and critiques for my restless mind to dig into. And hopefully, that will be copasetic. But I think this restlessness is partly me and partly the times we’re living in. How can we live quiet contented lives in a world that threatens to self-destruct every twenty-four hours or so? How can we ignore the crises enough to live and give and nurture while also not losing our sense of soul? I am betting these questions are not mine alone.

Sea change

Old folks who live by the sea talk about the "sea change." Visitors note how the water is at dramatically different levels morning, noon and night. Some may even get out charts and calculate when high or low tides will come. But only those who have spent their lives by the sea and in close communion with it can sense the change from rising to ebbing tide without such charts.

It's like a solstice when the sun stops its daily drift toward the southern horizon, appears to hold steady for three days and then moves incrementally back up the sky. None of the changes seem that dramatic in the moment, but the change in the tilt of the planet or in the tide is actually massive.

The tide comes in--huge volumes of water rise unstoppably--and then in a moment between one identical wave and the next... it stops. You can't see the switch from the beach. You wouldn't be able to tell for another hour, unless you're an old salt. But the sea has changed.

In that moment, the tide stopped coming in and the moon subtly began to pull it from the depths of space, so that it is receding. 

Sea change - massive change that appears incremental and inconsequential, that cannot be perceived in a short period of time, but in the end, is profound.

Scientists warn us that climate change is like that. We don't know exactly when our burning of fossil fuels and release of methane into the atmosphere will trigger the shift of some massive system into an unstoppable slide toward a vastly different world that may well be either unimaginably hot or brutally cold, depending on which shift is triggered. 

October every four years feels a bit like that too as votes trickle in and the tide of popular opinion is measured. But especially this time. While we fear the sea change of the climate, we desperately hope for this other one. So many small actions of resistance have gone into it, building up over the past two years toward desperately needed change.

Image via Pixabay

And in the end what really matters is not Trump but the shift in the hearts and minds of the nation. Even if that did not determine the outcome of the election, a shift toward empathy and science is really what is most needed.

This year I'm also undergoing a personal sea change. A path I set out on thirty years ago is ending or at least dramatically changing. The tide that carried me far from my childhood home is shifting back, drawing me back to the mountains of Eastern Oregon. And yet at the moment nothing much seems to be happening on the outside.

I am caught at that moment of shift, at the lowest ebb of the tide. The force that used to pull me away from my home and family has slackened and I feel a deep tide begin to tug me back. But I'm not moving yet. There is too much momentum to my life—a house, a garden, family, people, work, stuff, animals... It has all been headed in one direction for a long, long time and this place still demands me for another season.

But the shift has come. The decision has been made.

I am going back to Oregon. I will likely make the first part of the move sometime next summer. I have a provisional place to live and a rudimentary plan for how to survive materially. That’s the shift, having a feasible plan.

Why? I’ve decided this just before yet another election in which many of my fellow citizens are vowing that if things go badly they are really leaving the country this time. And I am going back.

I suppose the election could derail that. If violence really does break out in some massive way, I may not be able to come so soon. But the pull has shifted. My life is now pulling me back there, while for at least thirty years I was pulled out into other countries.

The reasons have many different levels. On one level, my kids need the change.

The schools in the Czech Republic, and particularly in our little town here, have proved disastrously inadequate. The curriculum is uninspired and guaranteed to deaden all curiosity and interest in learning. The teachers are indifferent to their craft. Some are more than happy to take advantage of the Covid crisis in order to flagrantly neglect their students. There certainly is little help for kids with the complex special needs my kids acquired with their difficult start in life.

Beyond the schools, the entire society here is hostile to my kids because of their Romani ancestry. I had hoped that our family could compensate for that, and we do to a large degree. Some Romani children might have been resilient enough to hold their heads up and find a positive identity despite the bigotry and negative stereotypes surrounding them in society. But these children have too many other struggles and that resilience has taken a beating. They need a society where they are at least not public enemy number one from birth.

The US is far from perfect on race and ethnicity issues. Many people will likely think I’m naive or worse in this part of the decision. But the fact is that while black and brown people in America encounter terrible prejudice, danger and hostility on a daily basis, people with olive skin and striking dark eyes are not the main focus of that bigotry. Here in the Czech Republic, they are. If my kids’ ancestry was African, I might well be making the opposite choice.

They will no doubt have to struggle in America—being non-white kids with English as a second language after all. But all things together, they’ll stand a better chance.

As for me, I need the change too. I started out well in this country twenty-five years ago. As a young, healthy, up-and-coming journalist able to live on next to nothing, this place took me in and let me flourish. The tight public transportation network was exactly what a young blind professional needed. The booming cosmopolitan atmosphere of the 1990s resonated in my soul.

But I’ve taken a few major hits over the years. The vibrant world of journalism I came here for disappeared after 9/11 due to economic and political circumstances. Prague’s scene changed and became more harsh and polarized. I had health trouble and am no longer the physical powerhouse I once was.

More than anything, my life shifted from the city to a small town and in fifteen years of trying I have failed to be truly accepted by that town. Pulling up my roots in the town of Mnichovice is the easiest part of this shift. I’ll simply have to tell the school my kids are transferring and say goodbye to exactly five pleasant acquaintances. That’s it. Not much to show for fifteen years of attempts to participate in community life and make friends.

Leaving my physical home and garden is the hardest part. When things were tough and my professional, social and community efforts were thwarted at every turn, I channeled my energy into my home and garden. And that effort has born delightful fruit.

Despite a cold, north-facing slope at a northern latitude, I have managed to sculpt it into a little paradise with greenhouses, herb gardens, a sauna, animals I love and a home specifically designed for the needs of a visually impaired person. I will likely never have that level of physical beauty and comfort in a home again.

It’s also likely the beginning of the end of my marriage. My husband agrees that the children desperately need this move and that I have been unfairly isolated and ostracized by the community here because of my vision impairment, but he cannot and does not want to leave himself. His professional work isn’t transferable and he has never had any interest in living anywhere else. He doesn’t like the United States that much, and because he isn’t a citizen, it would be a major struggle to get the papers for him to be able to live there.

So the partnership that started with practical necessity, fun late-night discussions and mutual respect may well end with a similar lack of fireworks. Or maybe it will endure in some transformed, long-distance state, but it is no longer the strong bond that held me here for so many years.

This fall the few last cords binding me firmly to this place snapped and when they gave way the weaker bonds went with very little resistance. Now I feel that giddy weightlessness like. you do at the end of the arc of a swing with a very long chain.

Wheeee!!! For a moment, you feel utterly free.

But I know that this is only a momentary illusion, a dizzy moment. There is another place waiting to pull me back and its pull has been strong for years already. Now without the momentum of something else to pull me away and with the needs of my children clearly pulling that direction, I will be coming home at last.

I hope that my sea change will coincide with a long awaited sea change for the whole world and for the United States specifically. I hope that we’ll look back on 2020 as the year people finally stopped ignoring climate change and a critical mass of people became willing to change business as usual in order to avoid catastrophe for future generations.

I hope that 2020 will not only mark the removal of Trump from office but the beginning of a long swing in the opposite direction, toward science-based policy, earth-centered economics, inclusive society and human solidarity. It’s all up to a shift in the hearts and thoughtful consideration of many people.

Can we make sacrifices when scientists say it's necessary?

In the Czech Republic we have lived with school quarantine and national lockdown for six weeks now.

The entire service industry—beyond grocery stores, gas stations and pharmacies—is shut down. Major factories have closed. All of the borders are closed. Road and air traffic has been cut to a minimum. People rarely leave their homes. Everything happens online.

Children study at home. Adults work online. The only activity you are allowed to do outdoors is go to a natural area to walk or bike alone. People who still have jobs and open businesses are allowed to go to work and one family member at a time can go shopping for food.

Image by Arie Farnam

That’s it. That is the new normal.

Everyone who leaves home must wear a face mask. Only if you are in your vehicle alone are you allowed to be without a facemask. If you are in your vehicle with your child, who shares your household and air every day, and you are not wearing facemasks, you are very likely to be stopped and fined.

It has been six weeks and while the economic strain may force some changes in May, there is no real end in sight. In some places Covid-19 lockdown may not be entirely enforced. But here it is strict and it isn’t just the authorities enforcing it. Social pressure is intense if any individual is seen outdoors without a mask.

My husband who rides his bike on the “communing with nature” exemption is often yelled at for not wearing a mask while speeding down a scarcely used rural road at 40 mph without a mask. Doctors say wearing a facemask during physical exertion is unsafe and can lead to heart attacks and that the distances involved make such exercise safe without a mask, but the media spin is all about Coronavirus with none left over for details.

The media reaction around Coronavirus has been off the charts. Fear has spread like wildfire. People I never would have believed would go in for such fear or be willing to change their way of life so drastically for anything have fallen into line like so many ants.

On the one hand, I hear criticisms over the phone from my few advanced students who work in medical fields. They say that, yes, COVID-19 is a bit worse than the flu and, yes, we should be concerned, but they worry that the fear reaction has been blown out of proportion and they wish people were more careful about other diseases that have caused and continue to cause preventable deaths.

I am watching the social situation with a certain amount of analytical interest. I would not have believed such massive economic and social restrictions would be accepted so enthusiastically by the public for anything short of an air raid or a nuclear attack. But the restrictions have been followed willingly and peer-enforced by the vast majority of the population.

Much of it appears to be motivated more by fear than by an altruistic desire to protect that portion of the population which is truly at risk of serious illness or death from COVID-19. But still even the idea that fear could motivate people to sacrifice in this way is novel and surprising.

I’ve spent much of the past ten years trying to raise concern about climate change and implementing what measures I could in my own life. It’s very hard to do something like that on your own. Anyone who is concerned about COVID-19 and trying to do voluntary social distancing in an area where authorities are not imposing it will now understand what I felt for years over climate change.

Frankly, the “sacrifices” we are making regarding COVID-19 aren’t that bad. The worst is probably that I may not see my family in Oregon this summer, and depending on what this does to the airline industry and the wider economy, it may be a long, long time, if I do see them in person ever again.

That hurts. No doubt about it. The thought of never being able to go home again hurts a lot. But I’ve always known that if real steps were ever taken to combat climate change, long-distance air travel would be one of the first things to go. I’ve been ready to give that up. It just didn’t make any sense to sacrifice my own family for a symbolic savings that would not in reality change anything for those dying due to the catastrophic effects of climate change.

The other sacrifices we are making because of COVID-19—staying home all the time, living in close quarters with family, being isolated from friends, foregoing social engagements and entertainment, taking economic and financial hits—these are not fun, but they are easily survivable. The hardest thing is dealing with insanely demanding and insensitive teachers, who insist my kids must do long lists of make-work exercises in order to keep them “occupied,” but refuse to teach online or provide interaction with kids.

All the actual teaching, explanations, motivating and corralling distracted kids must be done by parents, if teachers refuse to interact. With kids with special needs, that is easily a full-time job for me—a job I’m not paid for that prevents me from doing the work I might get paid for.

The combination of complex technological struggles and kids with learning and behavioral disabilities makes it one of the least pleasant times I have ever lived through. It is definitely less pleasant than the five months I spent on short rations in Siberia amid extreme economic crisis when I was nineteen, and that is saying something. But it is primarily the actions of insensitive and oblivious humans that make it that way, not the actual conditions of quarantine.

Other than the school issues, quarantine is easy if you live in a place where it is handed down from above. Work schedules have been accommodated to it. Food deliveries are sporadic but they keep coming. Official support for the measures and the fact that everyone else is doing it makes it easy.

My kids used to complain bitterly about the restrictions on our lives caused by combatting climate change. They could see that few of their friends take the train on a regular errands or walk and bike to school. They could see that their friends eat differently, don’t have to recycle and have a lot more plastic stuff at home. Even my husband resented our climate-related “Victory Garden.”

But the kids are fine with COVID-19 restrictions. It’s exciting and they feel like they are part of a community effort when they put on masks. They ask almost every day, if their friends can visit, but it is the other kids’ parents saying “no,” more than me. I’m not the one putting on the brakes and asking them to make sacrifices this time. They can see the facemasks on everyone’s faces when they watch people out on the road and even live in TV studios. They are happy about being home from school, though unhappy about the extra load of schoolwork. Most importantly, they don’t see it as my doing.

It’s easy when you don’t have to fight your family over it.

Many friends have started to refer to Victory Gardens online because of COVID-19. People who used to dismiss my calls for gardening and self-limiting to combat climate change are now ordering seeds and shovels.

The end result is actually much better for the climate and the people struggling to survive in flood and drought zones than anything activists achieved before. Long-haul air transport is now rare. The roads are empty. Everyone shops online for food and does without new plastic stuff because only grocery stores are open.

It’s easy when you don’t have to explain endlessly to dismissive and jocular friends why you choose limits.

I have to say that I am pleasantly surprised, even relieved to see that our society is capable of this. If we can do this over COVID-19, surely we can do it for the much greater, already very deadly and equally scientifically certain crisis of climate change.

The missing elements, of course, are the media frenzy and the official support for limits.

I used to have difficulty even imagining a scenario in which people in our society would actually act on climate change. Now it isn’t so hard to imagine. All I have to do is replace the word “Coronavirus” in the news cycle with “climate change,” and the scenario is all too realistic The intense media focus on the virus has infected every corner of the blogosphere, including avidly trend-bucking ol’ me.

If this amount of media attention was paid to climate change, I guarantee we would see significant remediation. Even if authorities didn’t act of their own accord, popular pressure would soon force them to. The onus now seems to really be on those who wield pens and cameras. It is our move in the struggle to save the world.

The media focus made Coronavirus the defining issue of 2020. Media focus can do the same on climate change. There are no more excuses. It’s a choice.

The sci-fi mystique of 2020

“It is the year 2020 and the first annual conference of sentient artificial persons is about to begin. One of the first agenda points is a resolution demanding that humans stop using the derogatory term “robot,” which comes from the Slavic word for “work” and gives the connotation that we should be the servants of humans forever…”

Wait a minute. That won’t work anymore. Sci-fi writers always have to push their stories ahead a couple of decades to give themselves enough room for imagination.

As a kid, I was confused about why George Orwell thought the year 1984 had a dire, futuristic feel to it. For me, it was just the mostly boring year I had our near neighbor as a second grade teacher, so that when my mom called me in sick so that i could go sledding in the first fresh snow of the winter, I got caught.

Photo by Arie Farnam

For my generation, 2020 was the year that sounded futuristic, cool and a bit scary. 2019 and all the other years since 2000 just looked weird written down and we had a hard time saying them at first. We were used to saying, “Nineteen ninety something.” So we naturally tried to say “Twenty” but then we had to say “Twenty O one” and “twenty O two,” so it just didn’t work.

But “twenty twenty” works nicely and it was safely remote enough that we could freely imagine a futuristic world, either utopian or dystopian. We were really expecting flying cars, robot soldiers and at least basic food replicators by now. Touch screen tablets actually turned out to be way cooler than our sci-fi could imagine and drones are a bit more boring than we pictured.

However, our sci-fi failed utterly to predict social and cultural changes. To be fair, sci-fi pretty much by definition has to go to extremes. Either the culture will be hopelessly jaded and cruel or we will somehow banish racism, ableism and bigotry of all sorts along with the common cold. Naturally, neither of those situations has fully materialized.

Sure, today’s culture is jaded and unhealthy in ways that we couldn’t have dreamed in the 1980s or 90s. The effects on general mentality and interactions that social media, nonstop video games and blanket advertising have had are way more depressingly banal than sci-fi authors of the past would have envisioned.

But I recently got a kick out of explaining to an ESL student studying professional English usage that the pronoun “his” is now simply considered wrong—rather than “politically incorrect”—in the sentence, “I’m the kind of employee who always stays late when his boss asks,” given that the student is female.

The ability to choose any music, video, book or magazine in a second and surround yourself with ad-free, thoughtful and wonderfully diverse voices (if you so choose) is also pretty amazing. The ability to buy almost everything online and rarely have to go to any store except the local mom-and-pop store on the corner is downright awesome.

Knowing that the casual homophobia my kids are exposed to in elementary school will be countered with a much more open-minded online world once they are a few years older gives me a little peace, while the continuation of deeply engrained racism and ableism in almost all social spaces fills me with despair.

Other than the touch-screen devices, the thing that is probably the truest to the science fiction and fantasy of my youth is the global disaster of climate change looming, while political and cultural leaders enact the modern equivalent of “the folly of Rohan”. Tolkien would only have been perplexed about how our Gandalf turned out to be a teenage girl with pigtails.

While it looks like life in 2020 is going to be just as mundane as it is every year while we’re living it, this coming year is the year we once envisioned as dramatic and decisive. And although it is just one more year in a series of numbered years, we could take that up. We could choose to make our resolutions less about losing weight or saving money and more about the kind of world we want to make real through our actions.

In 2020 Americans will participate in the election of another president, very likely the last president to have a real chance of averting catastrophic climate change. Vast numbers of people in Asia, Africa and South America are gaining a middle-class lifestyle, and through global interpersonal communication, we have more opportunity than ever before to expand our concept of “us.”

And yet many of us are struggling with personal lives that already feel survivalist, where every day is on the edge. My. hope for the new year is to find a clear path through the storm, a sense of direction.

May 2020 be a year to remember for much needed change.

Remember why: A note from my past self in Extinction Rebellion

This post is time travel. It’s a message from the past.

Really. I am writing this in mid-August. The sun is hot. The days are slow and lethargic. The Czechs call this season “cucumber season,” because in our short growing season mid-to-late August is the only season when cucumbers are ripe and so many people spend their time pickling.

My pickling cucumbers all died of mold, so my children will go without pickles this winter. Such is life.

But the other thing about this season is anticipation. And this year that is more true than ever before. We’re working up to what we grandiosely call “the Autumn Rebellion.” It is supposed to be a massive worldwide uprising of people demanding truth, justice and action to avoid ecological disaster.

Creative Commons image by Carl Nenzén Lovén

In London, Paris, Berlin and other western cities, it is supposed to bring transport and industry to a screeching halt. It is supposed shake the major state and corporate structures to their foundations and wake up their CEOs and legislators to the crisis. In smaller and less progressive places, like my own Prague, it is supposed to be the first major rallying cry, the days of love and courage with crowds of protesters, arrests and media coverage.

That’s the plan.

In the midst of a cucumber season with no cucumbers, I am filled with a bit of trepidation. Every day brings a fresh wave of new Extinction Rebellion volunteers. More than anything else, I fear they will be disappointed. They have finally risen, most for their first time doing anything even remotely activist. It’s the first real rising of public demand for change in a generation here. There were small protests, sure, but nothing that captured the hearts and minds of regular people beyond a committed (eccentric) few.

Beyond that, I am putting in far too much time and effort, more than is good for me. And I’ve already encountered some of the social ostracism I dread in any kind of group situation. I can’t help but look ahead with hope and anxiety side by side.

What will the first weeks of October bring? Will our dreams be realized? Will real change come at last? Will it be worth all the effort and sacrifice? Will anything happen at all?

That got me to thinking about sending a message to my future self. Because I know how hard it can be—in the midst of things—to remember the most basic reasons why we throw ourselves into something like this. I could so easily get caught up in worry, get freaked out over failures or be torn up over social rejection. So, if that’s the case, I hope this may help.

Here are the reasons I am doing this:

1. All last winter I was so depressed I couldn’t move. Every day I took a nap for an hour and a half or two hours because nothing seemed worth it and my body and mind were saturated with grief and despair. When I found Extinction Rebellion that changed overnight. Finally there was something worth doing.

2. I wasn’t in it to win. When I first joined in April there were ten active people in the entire Czech Republic. They were nice people, but I didn’t really think they could have hundreds or thousands of people active by the autumn. Neither did they. They just said that because it was a sort of goal to put out there. “A thousand people in the fall,” that’s what they said. But I was in it for the moment, for those ten and for whoever came each day.

3. My role in Extinction Rebellion quickly became that of hearth mother. I am among the older members and that’s a new experience for me, the first time I’ve ever been considered “old” by any standard. I also know how to cook. It’s fun to bring cake, carrot sticks and homemade hummus to a meeting and hear the cries of genuine gratitude from a dozen twenty-something vegans who can’t get a decent meal most places in this city. All of my work has been about feeding the earth defenders, holding hands, nurturing, reassuring, even hugging, as well as teaching empathy and first aid. And no matter what happens in the end, that endless, nearly invisible work will have gone on the same way a mother’s nurturing work goes without guarantees, just because it is needed.

4. We knew that a thousand people wouldn’t change government climate policy, even in one tiny little Eastern European country. We were doing it because it was the only reasonable and logical thing to do. We did it to be able to get up, look at ourselves in the mirror and not sob with shame and rage.

5. So, now we have 250 active rebels and it’s August. While I was a raw recruit in April, I am now considered a hardened elder and as such I have to play politics and fend off criticism. But I still have to get up every morning and look in the mirror. So, my reasons haven’t changed that much.

Some people have great hopes for this fall. All around the world people are gearing up and hoping for a massive uprising to force governments and corporations into real action, so that we can survive climate change.

I am among those who hope. I cannot help it. But at the same time I know that no plan survives contact with reality and that things could go haywire in a dozen different ways. It could be far bigger than we expect. It could get ugly with police or football rowdies or impatient drivers. It could be depressingly apathetic and small. We don’t know.

I also know the foibles and imperfections of humans. Extinction Rebellion has built a structure meant to foster a regenerative culture with equity, inclusion and ethics at its core. But still the people running it are just as human as the rest, coming from and living in a society that is toxic, ego-driven and unethical. Will this structure, which looks so good on a flip chart, hold? Will we live up to our ideals?

This is my note to my future self. Keep to your values. Welcome each one. Defend the vulnerable. Stand in your own strength. Seek authenticity.

Remember your reasons. Remember that we do this beyond hope, not for what it might bring in the future but for our self-respect here and now. Don’t lose sight of empathy. non-violence and love.

I will publish this at the midst of it—just before the full moon—when I will likely be too busy to write. It will be a note from the past to myself and to all those working hard the same way.

P.S. This is present-day me again. I’m glad for the reminders. There are now 400 organizers. If they all bring a friend or two, we’ll have a thousand at the big event on Saturday. But the most famous Czech pop singer has died and his memorial service will compete with our actions for media coverage. A massive soccer match will draw six thousand drunk Brits and who knows how many drunk Czechs to the city. And the local Extinction Rebellion group is fractured by factions banning this or that person, including me, from key information channels. Much of it looks like utter chaos. And yet, I have vegan chocolate cake, a fresh batch of hummus, camping chairs, a tent and first aid supplies. Come what may.

You can't force focus, but you can nurture it

What would it take to realistically face the climate crisis?

I’ll tell you. Not that much and yet it would take a huge, unaccustomed effort.

It would take people who have a yard digging it up and planting vegetables. It would take going to massive protests demanding science-based energy policy after work instead of going home and kicking back in front of a screen. It would take riding a bike to work even in the cold autumn rain and sleet. It would take remembering to bring a cloth bag when you go shopping. It would take going back up the stairs to turn off the light you forgot… every time. It would take fixing that old heating system, not next week but right now. It would take researching new recipes that have more legumes than meat.

In short, it would take constant focus, a million small actions and talking about it with everyone all the time as our highest priority in all the small moments of the day.

This is our unavoidable reality. Only about a quarter of our personal carbon footprint (that’s basically your personal contribution to climate change from being alive in an industrialized society) can be influenced by our small daily actions. BUT constant focus on this crisis, talking about it and demanding systemic change does matter and does help.

Creative Commons image by Jumbero of Flickr.com

In five short years, Germany went from being a major coal country to having a full 40 percent of its energy come from wind, solar and water, pushing coal into second place. That was only achieved by the incessant and fierce demands of regular people who never became famous like Greta Thunberg.

It can be done and we know what it will take. The tough part, of course, is that pretty much everyone has to focus on this for it to work. And that looks like a very tall order when a quarter of the people in a lot of countries still choose to believe ads by oil companies over scientists, and even those who “get it,” don’t get it because they don’t think about it unless a pollster specifically asks and they certainly don’t act on it.

When have people ever focused on something like this?

They did during WWII. In fact, a lot of the things we need to do now would be similar to those civilian wartime efforts—conserve resources, redirect industry, create jobs through planful programs and grow food in every yard. People talked about it every day and thought about it most hours of the day. It was stressful. Focus does that.

The Civil Rights movement was similar for those who were involved or directly impacted. Humanity pretty much hasn’t achieved anything massive or worth having without that kind of focus by at least some people. But it has occasionally happened. And it could happen now.

Except… except that the focus isn’t there. Focus is a kind of energy inside human beings. When it’s there we do amazing things. That whole thing about a mother being able to lift a car off of her trapped child—superhuman strength and all that? All that is is extreme focus. Every fiber, all the energy in a body, focused with laser-like intensity in one moment on one thing.

And this is a matter of focus too, though a bit broader and definitely longer lasting.

So how do we get people to focus on the climate crisis? Obviously, one of the problems with it is that because most of the threat is a decade or two in the future and realistic threats of apocalyptic scenarios are a generation away. What we have now is mostly theory with a few examples of major weather disasters, which are mostly someplace distant (and if they aren’t distant then you probably have a lot of very necessary survival tasks distracting you). It’s hard to sustain focus on something that is distant in time or place and it’s difficult to focus on something that it takes a chart to explain.

But there is also the despair factor.

One of the reasons I became particularly focused on the climate crisis this year was that I discovered a reason for hope—a very specific and concrete reason, a local Extinction Rebellion group. When I found that group and saw that the members were serious and dedicated to both responsible action to bring societal focus to the climate crisis and to the kind of social inclusion that will actually make it worthwhile, I essentially stopped needing to sleep.

I wasn’t forcing myself to focus. It was easy. i had to force my body and mind to relax in order to make the effort sustainable. But the actual focus, the effort involved, felt effortless for months.

Then a strange thing happened. Whereas this group had begun as an oasis of positive focus, a thread of infighting, egoism and social exclusion entered into it. It happens in groups all the time.

Extinction Rebellion has safeguards against this sort of thing—conflict resolution mechanisms and decentralization to avoid power trips, but there were those who argued our group was too small and too fragile for these things to be implemented. In trying to protect what we had built, the safeguards were sacrificed, first for just awhile and then for months. Authoritarian methods were allowed, as a “necessary evil” and conflict resolution was put off indefinitely with vulnerable people being sidelined.

Most of the group is still going strong and still an excellent group. But the abandonment of these safeguards in those places where problems arose took the wind right out of my sails. I can already see the cost and I know what the eventual price will be, if this is not turned around.

I’m still involved, still keeping up the responsibilities I took on. But it isn’t effortless anymore. I have to force myself to do it. My focus is broken. I’m not entirely burnt out physically, just unmotivated.

I still have my personal focus on the climate and ecological crisis. I still do my garden and all the other little daily things that need to be done. I still talk about it and think about it most of every day. But I can understand why others don’t have that focus. A lot of people see no hope in the climate crisis or at least nothing truly useful they can do personally.

And I don’t entirely blame them. This is a massive problem and there is a lot of discouraging propaganda out there, either confusing people about the very clear scientific conclusions giving us existential warnings or pushing crippling despair.

I look at the historical accounts of times when large groups of people truly did focus on something important. There were exceptions, of course. There were people who didn’t pitch in or who took advantage, but vast numbers of people did focus. And I know we can’t force that kind of focus.

Sure, we need to eventually legislate conservation rules and we definitely need public figures, institutions and the media to start intensively telling the truth about the crisis. But we also can and must nurture the kind of focus we need.

That means acting with integrity. It means practicing the good things we talk about and following through with commitments. It means supporting one another and putting aside self-serving motives most of the time. It means, in short, being the people we always wanted to be.

Courage from wherever you stand

If there is one thing I wish I could give my readers these days it is the feeling that the climate crisis is like a war.

For some it is easy to see it as a war of us against them—us, the ordinary people who mostly want to do something about it, against them, the greedy one-percenters who run most of the industry and make most of the political decisions. But it isn’t at its core an us-versus-them war.

It’s an us-versus-ignorance war. Slowly the ignorance is falling away and we will focus more and more on fighting to mitigate the collapse of our ecological life-support system. But still it will be an us-versus-ignorance war. It will just be against the effects created by the ignorance of the past.

Even the wealthy have to eat and even if they may have bunkers, there is no possible future in which climate collapse goes forward unchecked and they don’t seriously regret not paying attention earlier. It is still primarily about ignorance. “Ignor-ance” has its roots in willfully ignoring and denying reality. That is what we are up against—the denial ignorance of the wealthy, the misled ignorance of the poor and the despairing and apathetic ignorance of everyone in between.

Image by Arie Farnam

Plenty of people are saying that we need to respond to the climate crisis the way we responded to World War Two. It’s true on so many levels. The climate emergency is already claiming hundreds of thousands of lives and it will soon claim millions and then billions, if we do nothing. The scale is at least as massive as the second world war was and it will reach into every person’s life just as that war did. It will require many personal sacrifices, political focus, economic manipulation and social solidarity, just as that war did.

It already requires a great deal of courage.

Of course, there is the courage of people protesting and putting their bodies in the way of fossil fuel extraction, processing and transport. There are the people chained or glued to government or corporate doorways. There are those sitting down in front of police wielding chemical weapons and people standing in the middle of intersections, demanding that other humans do indeed stop business as usual, stop driving, pay attention and treat science as a real-world matter.

Some people look at these protesters, often dressed up or in a excited, bonded group, and assume it must be fun or they must be in it for the adventure. And there may be some who are in it for adventure the first time around. But a lot of people are doing it again and again. They are willing to be roughed up by irritable police on extra shifts and willing to spend long, cold nights in improvised cells. They know what they are in for.

That is courage. I’ve seen a lot of people grasping courage these days, more than I think I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.

There’s the courage of a young mother, so scared she’s trembling, who he accepts the role of press spokesperson for an action anyway, because all the people without babies are either on the blockade line or doing risky conflict deescalation work. There is no one else who can address the TV cameras. So she does it, even though she’s never been an activist before.

There’s the fourteen-year-old girl who signed up to learn to be a field medic with her parents’ consent, willing to wade into fields of tear gas and distribute clothes soaked in antacid to people gasping for breath. There’s the courage of those worried parents who know this is something she has to do.

There’s the woman who I watched stumble through a workshop presentation for new climate action volunteers in which two young men decided to pick apart her every statement. Walking to the subway together after I helped her lock up the office in the evening, she confessed that it wasn’t just her first workshop presentation but the first time she had ever spoken in front of a group of people in her life.

I have not chained myself to anything strategic or refused to move under police orders. Not yet at least. Some of my rebel friends are willing to forgive me this reticence because I have a disability and a disabled child. “Well, that’s why Arie isn’t out there getting arrested.” I’m the one teaching the medics and the deescalation teams. I’m the one holding the hands of new volunteers, giving a dozen pep talks a day.

But I’ve had to poke deep into my own reserves of courage. When I first signed up my family and close friends were all warning me to be careful, even asking me not to join Extinction Rebellion because whenever I have joined community organizations before it has always ended in pain, social rejection and deep depression. The fact is that, especially where I live in the Czech Republic, a disabled. middle aged woman with strange-looking eyes and awkward social communication is not well accepted. My family didn’t want me to go through all that again.

When I go into groups, I can’t make eye contact or play out the little exchanges of non-verbal communication. Mostly people don’t realize this or understand what it means. They just get the feeling that I’m aloof or uncool, or most oddly, calculating and competitive. The inevitable result has been a lot of social isolation. I join groups enthusiastically, get a lot of confused reactions and soon find myself mysteriously dropped off the invitation list.

So joining Extinction Rebellion, I was so scared that I lay awake all night shaking after every meeting in the beginning. But I knew I had to go anyway.

I wish I could tell you those fears were entirely unfounded. I will say that Extinction Rebellion tries hard to be open to all—people with disabilities, older people and people with children included. It’s a real topic of discussion and those discussions matter. I’ve never found a group where I did feel this welcome. But I have run into people who reject me out-of-hand, even in the consciously inclusive culture of XR.

Facing fears doesn’t mean facing down only illusion. Much of the fear is real. Those protesters in France really did get viciously attacked by police while sitting calmly and quietly. Some people really did needlessly torment that first-time workshop presenter. And every time I play the role of social greeter at an XR event, I will get some hard looks and some cold shoulders, which cut deep because of the social context of long-term ostracism.

It’s a time for courage. Whatever terrors you have to face, now is the time.

And there is another part of courage we all have to seize together. Not a day goes by when someone doesn’t ask me some version of the question, “Isn’t it too late and hopeless anyway?”

There are a hundred arguments why the key strategies to mitigate climate disaster won’t work. Most solar panels are made in China using minerals mined at great environmental cost and then there’s the methane in the arctic lakes, all the tipping points we may have already crossed, And that’s just the science part. We have only just begun to demand real political and economic change and those systems don’t want to change. We may well not be able to bring our society to change quickly enough. And if we manage it here, will we be able to get China and India to join us? The odds seem awfully long on stopping CO2 emissions in the time frame scientists have said we must, if we want to avoid global calamity .

In 1938, when the allies signed the Munich agreement with Hitler to allow the Nazis to take Czechoslovakia in an attempt to deny the inevitable, people who warned of the encroaching tide of fascism were called “alarmists.” And then when the allied forces did go up against fascism, it looked hopeless. It looked like we had waited too long.

That’s what Hollywood portrayals of World War Two don’t show. They say they’re showing courage, the heroic battles in which good conquers evil in the real world. But the reality is that those French resistance fighters, those nurses in Blitz-torn London, those teenage girls holding the Eastern front in some Russian town, those Romani prisoners rebelling in a concentration camp, those boys on the Normandy beaches, those fighter pilots over the North Sea and those victory gardeners on the other side of the Atlantic waiting for husbands, sons and fathers to come home did not have good odds. We look back at them through the lens of what did happen. They fought and they won, so of course they had the courage to fight.

But it wasn’t an easy choice for many of them. There were times during the war when it looked very bleak. In our struggle now, it looks bleak. It looks like the risks we take and the sacrifices we make may be for nothing.

In that too, we need courage—not because we know we’ll win but because the only way to live well now is to fight this war against ignorance,

We are sorry but we must break the law

A rugged start in Extinction Rebellion deescalation practices

On a rainy Monday in Prague, a group of activists met in a neglected park near a major traffic artery -- Nervous, skittish and just beginning to pump adrenaline, they unfurled their banners in a few practice runs, getting them upside down more often than not.

The people I had trained as a deescalation team, mostly at the last minute in a rushed explanation of psychology--the prefrontal cortex, the door to the panic center of the brain and the principles of active listening--were so dazed that they repeatedly forgot to even go into action at all during the practice runs. About half of the deescalation team had done a few role-plays in my kitchen. That was it.

Rebel for life - Photo by XR Praha

A large majority of us were first-time activists, barely having been to a few quiet (and completely legal) political rallies. And here they were preparing to flagrantly break the law.

But we got our signalling system drilled to the point where I was reasonably sure we wouldn't be hit by oncoming traffic and then we went into action.

Unsuspecting drivers whizzed by us while we politely waited at a red light. Then the first signaler called, "Blue team into action!" The small group with me started across the intersection unrolling our large blue banner, which read, "You can't outrun the climate crisis." . A minute later I vaguely heard the call "Green into action!" as the group with the green banner blocked the other axes of the intersection.

My deescalation teams were darting out into the traffic backed up in front of them, offering apologies, cookies and informative fliers along with their hastily trained active-listening and non-violent communication skills. Someone gave a warning shout about a motorcycle and I went for him.

I barely had to think of my calming techniques. My shoulders were relaxed, my hands nonthreatening as I loosely offered him a flyer. He smiled back at me under his visor and I thought things were going fine.

Then a van broke ranks behind him, lurched forward with aggressive honking and swearing. It had become clear that we were there to stay for at least a few minutes--seven minutes according to plan.

I immediately left the motorcycle driver and approached the van, which had stopped but continued to jerk forward in little starts toward our people at the banner. "I can see that you're upset," I said, forcing a little volume into my unwilling voice. "Can I help you?"

I never got the chance to exercise active listening and calm the driver down. By this time, our signal guy was bellowing at the driver with a megaphone and the van was physically pushing a teenage girl and a photographer into the middle of the intersection.

I think I said, "Please stop! This is dangerous!" The driver yelled incoherent curse words. I was torn with indecision for a second and then the chance to act was gone anyway.

Our safety people managed to get the two endangered individuals out of the way and I managed to stop the stream of cars behind the van by the simple expedience of stepping behind its bumper and standing still, thus avoiding a rush that would have seriously put the lives of my deescalation team--back in the traffic with cookies and fliers--at risk.

In the end, the crisis was averted but other drivers were upset because of the scene. One woman got out of her vehicle sobbing that her child was at home and she had to get to him, as if our protest truly heralded an immediate collapse of civilization. Our deescalation team hurried to listen, apologize and explain that we were only there for seven minutes. The tone reduced from panic to sullen angst.

Photo by XR Praha

Why take these risks, you might well ask, for a moment with a banner?

Of course, it isn't for the banner. Most of the drivers can't even see it. This is one of the basic tactics of Extinction Rebellion, one I was very skeptical about when I first joined. I wanted to protest big polluters and corrupt politicians. But as I read more and came to understand the psychological and socio-political dynamics of the situation I became less reticent.

This blockade, like every other Extinction Rebellion action, is part of a wave of disruption that forces the climate crisis into the forefront of everyone's minds and onto the front pages of every newspaper and the first minutes of every news broadcast. Without this disruption of the lives of ordinary people--without a shit-load of such disruptions--there is no way we will see change fast enough to avoid massive famine and economic collapse.

As just about every literate person on the planet has read by now, the latest IPCC report, which is a very conservative consensus of a lot of different scientific perspectives, gave us twelve years to solve the climate crisis if we wish to have any real hope of avoiding a vast collapse of our civilization and food-production systems.

That's not to say we have twelve years to START working on it. We have twelve years to implement changes in the global industrial economy so vast that there is really nothing to compare them to, though the build up to World War Two and the Marshal Plan combined are often invoked as an example solution. And so far, there is not one government on the planet that is truly taking it seriously.

But there is one that has at least pledged to do so, and that is the British government, where Extinction Rebellion really got started in April. The tactic of massive disruption achieved its first stated goal. The British government was forced to declare a climate emergency.

But more than that, it created an unprecedented storm of media coverage and public concern over climate change. Most of it wasn't even in support of Extinction Rebellion initially. But the more the media looked into it and the more people paid attention and read about the crisis, the more everyone realized how serious the crisis is.

We activists are not in a popularity contest. We are not out in the road risking our lives because we think that will convince someone to agree with us. We are an emergency siren. We are simply a wave of disruption that forced British society to wake up and pay attention and which will do the same in every place we can.

We are sorry. Really I am sorry. I want to apologize to the frightened woman with her child at home and to all the others who were just tired and heading home from work. We do not want to do this. I would apologize if I had to wake you up at night to warn you of a fire in the building, but I'd still do it. We have no choice but to disrupt life as usual and even to break the law. This is an emergency.