You get a bit of a ramble this week.

Growing up, I understood writer’s block to be a lack of ideas, and that always seemed odd to me. For whatever reason, I’ve never been short on ideas. Maybe it’s different for some people, but in my case, it tends to be a mixture of other things. Part of it is perfectionism. If I have something worth saying, I want to get it right, especially with how often misunderstandings occur. Some of it is also doubtless an issue of executive function. I’m pretty sure I have ADHD, but I’ve yet to make myself invest the energy and money into what seems to be an iffy and often arduous assessment and diagnosis process. It can be hard to “just do it” when your brain isn’t doing chemicals right.

And I think some of it is because I’ve always had a hard time staying on just one topic (which could relate to the ADHD). More often than not, I see everything as being connected to everything else, and while it’s a perspective I wish more people shared, it does make it hard for me to draw lines around a particular topic.

When I was writing about how the US was oppressive before Trump came along, I left out uncountable examples, some of which I’ve written about before. I also didn’t go into as much detail in making my argument as I could have. Concepts like freedom and oppression don’t have universal definitions, and they so often seem to depend on cultural norms and some level of collective agreement. The US is full of people who would doubtless consider themselves to be free, either because they don’t understand the source of their problems, or because they are like the dog who, never having pulled against its leash, believes it has no bonds. Olayemi Olurin has talked a lot about her work as a public defender, and one of the things she has said is that white people are often difficult clients, because it’s not until they’re in the system that they realize they don’t have a lot of the rights they thought they did. Should I have included a couple paragraphs about that sort of thing? I don’t think so, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no cost in choosing not to.

So I have several drafts that apparently need to age a little before I can finish them, and instead of the intended article, you’re getting this.

And on the note of leaving things out, there was one thing I don’t think I covered well in my recent El Niño piece, which is that this summer, despite all of its records, is not the one to worry about. The heat won’t really hit till this coming winter (for my fellow northern hemisphere types). What we’ve seen this summer is probably better seen as the baseline from which El Niño will raise the temperature. That’s why climate scientists are pretty freaked out. Global warming is already causing crop failures to the tune of billions of dollars (to say nothing of lives lost), and now we’re headed into a major global heat event.

The planet hasn’t seen CO2 levels this high since Lucy’s era four million years ago, and the rate of increase has gone up recently. If we account for amplifying feedbacks, we’re moving past the time when our ancestors looked like apes, and toward the time when our ancestors looked more like rats or squirrels. This is going to affect everything, and it will be used as a weapon against most of humanity, by those who care only about power.

One of the points I’m fumbling around, in a draft that I hope to finish some day soon, is that if we do not change our political and economic systems, humanity will not survive this. We depend on reliable weather patterns that no longer exist. We built for extremes that are starting to seem mild. We developed our societies on the assumptions of infinite natural resources, and an infinitely resilient natural world. We’ve had to deal with problems caused by those assumptions plenty of times, but we’ve only ever tinkered with the system. It’s debatable if that was ever enough, but now it’s definitely not.

We have all the tools we need, but our political and economic systems will not let us use them, because the people running those systems do not value life.

I’ve said all this before, but I’m trying to learn to be OK with repeating myself. I’ve made a small study of rhetoric, and how messaging can be used to change people’s minds, and there seems to be universal agreement that repetition is key. To quote Frank Luntz, who bears more responsibility for the climate crisis than most:

“There’s a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again, and about the time that you’re absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time. And it is so hard but you’ve just got to keep repeating, because we hear so many different things–the noises from outside, the sounds, all the things that are coming into our head, the 200 cable channels and the satellite versus cable, and what we hear from our friends. We as Americans and as humans have very selective hearing and very selective memory. We only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.”

I don’t know what’s wrong with Luntz’ moral compass that has led him to do so much harm with the tools he has, but he’s absolutely correct about this, and the cacophony he described in that quote has only gotten worse in the 21 years since he said it.

Maybe the thing to do is find a point worth saying again any time the piece I want to publish isn’t ready.