Great essay on climate change and how silence about it is the worst thing about the problem. The powers that be continue to maintain silence:
Never has a silence been so loud or so resonant. This is not a passive silence. It is an active silence, a fierce commitment to distraction and irrelevance in the face of an existential crisis. It is a void assiduously filled with trivia and amusement, gossip and spectacle. Talk about anything, but not about this. But while the people who dominate the means of communication frantically avoid the subject, the planet speaks, in a roar becoming impossible to ignore. These days of atmospheric rage, these heatshocks and wildfires ignore the angry shushing and burst rudely into our silent retreat.
The average person feels there is little they can do. This is how the world is shaping up to be and so they have little choice. In the backdrop of what the author describes as "active silence" this makes sense. Climate change is not the only topic where this applies. When the problem is too vast and too hard to solve, those in power choose not to talk about it because it would clearly demonstrate their inability and unwillingness to do what is needed to bring about change. By filling the space with amusement, distraction and nonsensical prattle, they change the topic to things they can speak to. None of those topics matter to the average person. It just keeps them pre-occupied and unable to focus on what really does.
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