Hope small
by Tom Sullivan
Hurricane Dorian’s grim aftermath in the Bahamas, the expected worsening effects of climate change, and both institutional and mental breakdowns in Washington, D.C. cannot but help but foster a sense of impending doom. Natural disasters we have seen before. A major political party led by one and dedicated to magnifying his impact is something new.
But out of the darkness shine beams of light here and there. South Florida is mobilizing to send relief to the Bahamas. A World War II Douglas C-47 Skytrain that dropped Allied paratroopers into France 75 years ago is ferrying supplies to tempest-tossed Bahamians.
“Florida man” is often a punchline, but an unidentified one strolled into a Jacksonville, Florida Costco on Wednesday and left with 100 generators and bulk foods totaling $49,000 for Grand Bahama and Abaco. All CNN reported is he is a farmer.
At New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen paints a depressing portrait of a coming climate apocalypse abetted by our human need for denial as well as by financial markets with a rudder comparable to Titanic’s. (Don’t read it before you’ve had your coffee.) Averting catastrophe at this point is only theoretically possible. Rather than entertain false ones, Franzen recommends “a more balanced portfolio of hopes” and in addition to efforts on global challenges fighting smaller, “smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning.” For your community. For wild spaces.
There, too, is where James Fallows finds hope: in local innovations that succeed where global ones falter. Philip Zelikow, once worked in national security posts for both Presidents Bush and is now Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Zelikow believes there is more cultural signaling going on today inside the Beltway than actual policy. Where change is really happening is locally “where people have no choice but to solve problems week by week.” People like South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
This assessment aligns with Fallows’ observations from his “Our Towns” series. The collapse of Rome, fragmentation of power, he ponders (citing others), opened space for local developments that, over time, birthed the modern world.
But not so fast, says his friend, Eric Schnurer. The Dark Ages really were dark. Big structural changes, he argues, always come from the accumulation of smaller efforts. Rapid upheaval rarely works out well.
Schnurer responds:
The enlightening place to look is always local. If you want to know where the world is headed, you need to find the unknown lunatics toiling away in a lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, or a patent office in Basel, or a garage in Menlo Park, California, or the mayor’s office in South Bend—not what the world leaders and experts are saying … I don’t know if finding what people are up to should be encouraging of optimism—I mean, some local innovation includes some bizarre people meeting in Munich beer halls who a decade later launch WWII—but it’s instructive …
Local is where most people always choose to get involved: It’s not just the current dysfunctionality that channels most people into school-board meetings instead of seeking to draft new national legislation. Some small number of crazy people like you and me are drawn to the latter, but that’s a distinct minority, always has been, and always will be.
My work has brought me into contact with people all around the country who were thinking about productive little ideas about how to improve their neighborhoods, their kid’s school, their small business and how it affected their workers, etc. … My contribution has been largely in recognizing them and thinking, Hey, that would make a great basis for a “program” that my candidate could propose, scale up, and fund as governor!
People who read ancient blogs like this one are not normal. Normal people don’t spend their weekend in campaign school, Democracy for America’s Arshad Hasan said in the first one I attended. But online communities function as networked localities for nurturing new ideas that, Schnurer argues, could become the foundation for a post-empire, new normal. Change is only scary until it isn’t.
Sure, the entire world as we know it being wiped away sounds scary, but it’s not necessarily “awful.” If you told people in the 13th century about the world today—family, church, village, political overlord, entire basis of the economy, entire intellectual framework (“Evolution?” “Relativity?” “Quantum mechanics?”), all as you knew them completely gone—they’d think that 100 percent awful. But do you know a single person who would rather be living in the 13th century than today?
No, but growing up I always figured the 21st would be more like Tomorrowland. For Bahamians and many Pacific Islanders it’s looking more like Mad Max or Waterworld.