If Enough Of Us Stop Looking Away

Fury Is An Entirely Appropriate Response To A System That Sends Young People To Kill Other Young People In A War That Never Should Have Been Waged. Yet The American Right Is Forever Trying To Pathologise Anger As Something Menacing And Abnormal, Dismissing War Opponents As Hateful And, In The Latest Slur, "wild-eyed". This Is Much Harder To Do When Victims Of Wars Begin To Speak For Themselves: No One Questions The Wildness In The Eyes Of A Mother Or Father Who Has Just Lost A Son Or Daughter, Or The Fury Of A Soldier Who Knows That He Is Being Asked To Kill, And To Die, Needlessly.

It Is Always Easier To Deny Reality Than To Allow Our Worldview To Be Shattered, A Fact That Was As True Of Die-hard Stalinists At The Height Of The Purges As It Is Of Libertarian Climate Change Deniers Today.

It Is Eminently Possible To Have A Market-based Economy That Requires No Such Brutality And Demands No Such Ideological Purity. A Free Market In Consumer Products Can Coexist With Free Public Health Care, With Public Schools, With A Large Segment Of The Economy -- Like A National Oil Company -- Held In State Hands. It's Equally Possible To Require Corporations To Pay Decent Wages, To Respect The Right Of Workers To Form Unions, And For Governments To Tax And Redistribute Wealth So That The Sharp Inequalities That Mark The Corporatist State Are Reduced. Markets Need Not Be Fundamentalist.

When It Comes To Paying Contractors, The Sky Is The Limit; When It Comes To Financing The Basic Functions Of The State, The Coffers Are Empty.

One Of The Most Disturbing Ways That Climate Change Is Already Playing Out Is Through What Ecologists Call "mismatch" Or "mistiming." This Is The Process Whereby Warming Causes Animals To Fall Out Of Step With A Critical Food Source, Particularly At Breeding Times, When A Failure To Find Enough Food Can Lead To Rapid Population Losses.