Thread by @doctorow

My latest @locusmag column is "The Swerve," a short essay about the shape that hope takes when happy endings are off the table:

locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-d… 1/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2022/07/05/gra… 2/

It's specifically about the looming environmental collapse, but it also describes my view on the polycrisis of musketfuckery, forced birth, and covid denial. 3/

In this metaphor, we are in a bus barreling toward a cliff. The people in the front seats - who control the driver - insist that we don't need to turn the bus before we go over the edge. 4/

Indeed, they insist that turning the wheel is reckless, because the bus might roll and someone might break a leg.

When we demand to know what they're going to do about that cliff and the long plummet to the rocks below, we're called alarmists. 5/

There's plenty of time to build a bridge. Also, maybe we don't *need* a bridge! Maybe we'll figure out how to add wings to the bus, or a cool rocket engine!

I wrote this column back in May (print magazines have long production cycles). 6/

Back then, the southwest was on fire and The @Guardian was reporting on the "carbon bombs" that the fossil fuel industry was planning to detonate around us:

theguardian.com/environment/ng… 7/

Six weeks later, I write these words from beneath a "heat dome" over my home in California that has made leaving the house literally painful for several hours every day. We're almost at wildfire season, too. 8/

Then there's the polycrisis, which has exploded over the past six weeks, as the war in Ukraine deepened, as mass shootings swept the country, as forced birth laws went into effect in more than a dozen states. 9/

Omicron BA.4/5 is kicking off, escaping both vaccine and recovery immunities.

The time to fix the climate emergency was decades ago, back when Exxon's own scientists warned them that action was needed (#ExxonKnew). 10/

They warned us about the cliff over the horizon, and Exxon - and the rest of the hydrocarbon death cult - spent billions to convince us that there was no cliff.

The good news is that climate denial is over (covid denial's still in its prime, though). 11/

The bad news is that the deniers have pivoted to incrementalism. They want us to tinker in the margins. Swap out plastic straws for paper ones (but keep pretending that all the *other* single-use plastic is recyclable).

pluralistic.net/2022/04/26/pla… 12/

Switch to electric vehicles (and keep up the geometrically incoherent pretense that it's possible to climate-harden our cities without public transit).

wired.com/story/technolo… 13/

Europe - and the world - now say that if we're going to switch off the supply of Russian gas, we're going to have to switch the coal plants back on. You can punish the mad dictator of Russia, or you can have a habitable planet for your kids, but not both. 14/

There's an old joke from Ireland whose punchline is "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here." The time to build out renewable capacity and shutter oil and gas and coal plants was twenty years ago. 15/

We could have started under George HW Bush, who campaigned in 1988 on convening a global summit, including China and the USSR, to "talk about global warming." 16/

But the climate deniers went to work on Bush after he took office, and in 1992, he told the Rio Earth Summit that "the American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period." 17/

We have run out of time to build a bridge. We're going to have to yank the bus wheel. At this late stage, the hopeful future is based on the swerve. The people at the front are right that this will probably roll the bus. They're right that it's gonna hurt. 18/

But they're wrong about everything else.

As I write in *Locus*, "I don’t know what the first-class passengers were thinking. Some of them will be dead of natural causes before the bus goes over the cliff. 19/

"They didn’t want to sacrifice any of their material comforts to ensure that the rest of us continued to live once they passed on, I suppose.

"Others are just ideologically committed to traveling in a straight line. The swerve is morally bankrupt. It’s communism. 20/

"The only way to get over the cliff – if such a thing exists – is to *floor* the bus. Go as fast as possible. Leap the gorge! The Fonz did it, right?" 21/

One week ago, I became a US citizen. Friends asked me why I'd want to become a citizen of a country whose politics and culture have descended into such dysfunction? I answered that it was the dysfunction that made me want my citizenship. 22/

Remember when Trump's #MuslimBan went into effect and permanent residents of the US were taken into immigration detention and denied access to lawyers unless they surrendered their Green Cards first? President DeSantis or Cruz will do the same and worse. 23/

The more human rights I can lay claim to, the better. Citizenship isn't an inviolable shield against authoritarians, but the life of a US citizen is *far* less precarious than the life of an immigrant, even one with "permanent residency." 24/

Yesterday was July 4, my first Independence Day as an American citizen. I made dinner and we hosted friends, and I decorated the back yard with my American heroes - dozens of photos of people who fought in some way to make this a better place:

flickr.com/search/?sort=d… 25/

We ate dinner surrounded by these fighters, who all tried to grab the wheel in one way or another. We ate while our phone chimed with news of mass shootings. We ate in the swelter of the heat dome. 26/

The swerve is our hopeful future. It's not a future where we avoid disaster, but it *is* a future where we *stop pretending that there is no disaster.* It's a future where refugee crises continue, but where we meet them with humanitarian aid, not gulags and razor wire. 27/

It's a future of wildfires, but one where we use controlled burns to reduce them and evacuations to minimize their harm. 28/

It's a future of habitat loss driving zoonotic plagues, but it's a future where we learn covid's lessons and apply them to create effective public health responses. 29/

It's a future of mass extinctions, but it's also one where we commit to habit restoration and rescue as many of our "horizontal brothers and sisters" (as John Muir put it) as we can. 30/

In many ways, it's a terrible future. It's too late to build a bridge, or fix the bus's brakes, or do anything except yank the wheel. It's gonna hurt. 31/

But the helpless nightmare of sitting in the back of the bus while its well-fed up there in the front rows insist that we can't do *anything*? Ending that is a hopeful future. It's the happy ending we can hope for. 32/

It's too late to avoid disaster, but it doesn't have to be a catastrophe. We gotta grab the wheel. Oust every "good" politician who refuses to wield the power we handed to them. Work in your community to help your neighbors. 33/

Give material support to people fleeing cruel forced birth laws. Demand better. Fight. Be part of the lineage of American heroes who fought and fought. Fight on. Grab the wheel. Let's roll. 34/