Oceanoxia

Exploring an increasingly strange new world

Some More News: Protests Don’t Need To Be Civil

The world is too complex to have its problems solved by the removal of one particular line of thinking. That said, I’d love to see the end of this notion that movements for change have to be “civil”. There is nothing civil about the way our system works today, it’s just that people who are well served by that system get to pretend otherwise, because the cops aren’t busting down their doors, and attacking their families. We don’t have a civil society, we have a society that constantly, desperately works to avoid looking at the chaos, violence, and incivility that keep things the way they are. For those who want a better world, civility is only of use when it’s the best tactic to further our goals. It has no inherent value, in the face of hatred, climate change, and the blood-soaked machine of capitalism.

Police State: Atlanta Cops Arrest Organizers for Legal Activity

Tomorrow is a day of action for those working to stop Cop City, in Atlanta, Georgia.

For any who need to catch-up, “Cop City” is a police training facility that the city government of Atlanta wants to build. The planned location is currently forested, but it used to be a prison plantation, and a dumping ground. The facility will include firing ranges, explosives training, a helicopter landing pad, and a mock city, all for cops to train in urban warfare and suppressing political demonstrations. The local community does not want this. Part of it is because they use the forest as a park, part is the importance of opposing deforestation, and part of it is not wanting a massive police training facility in their community. Even leaving aside the problems that police cause wherever they go, who wants the soundtrack of their home life to be gunfire and explosions?

Most of the city opposes this, as has been demonstrated every time there’s an opportunity for public comment. It seems like there will be an attempt to have city employees show up to speak in favor of the facility tomorrow, which seems fitting, since the only people who want this thing seem to be the mayors office, the cops, and the corporations helping to fund this. On that note – the supposed cost of this facility was originally slated at $90 million, with $30 million coming from Atlanta taxpayers, and $60 million from an assortment of corporations. It has now come out that the city will have to pay more than double what was originally announced, at $67 million, and I think it would be foolish to assume that that cost won’t keep rising. I guarantee there are better uses for that money.

But wait! It gets worse!

In addition to murdering a forest protector, the cops have arrested dozens of other activists on trumped up domestic terrorism charges. In response, the movement arranged a bail fund, so that people wouldn’t just be locked up prior to their trial. This is an entirely legal thing to do, despite the fact that cops and other conservatives don’t seem to like it. Apparently, however, the cops don’t care about whether it’s legal. They don’t like it when people stand up to them, and they want to keep the activists locked up, so they arrested the people organizing the bail fund, on charges of money laundering and charity fraud:

Under the direction of the Republican state attorney general, Christopher Carr, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Atlanta Police Department carried out the arrests of Marlon Scott Kautz, Savannah Patterson, and Adele Maclean of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund (ASF).

The group offers financial support to people who have been arrested for protesting, including the dozens of people who have been detained for resisting the development of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, also known by critics as Cop City—a $90 million police training facility that would take up 85 acres of publicly-owned forest.

The three board members were charged with money laundering and charity fraud, leading state Rep. Saira Draper (D-90) to question the state’s use of SWAT teams and helicopters to conduct the raid in a residential neighborhood.

“Peaceful protest is as American as apple pie,” said Draper. “Using heavy handed tactics to suppress peaceful protest is shameful.”

Writer and historian William Horne denounced the arrests as “the behavior of a fascist police state.”

Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, told The Intercept on Wednesday that the ASF is “the first bail fund to be attacked in this way.” The funds have been used for at least a century to pool together communities’ financial resources to help bail people, including civil rights protesters, out of jail.

“There is absolutely not a scintilla of fact or evidence that anything illegal has ever transpired with regard to Atlanta fundraising for bail support,” Regan said.

She added in a press statement that “bailing out protestors who exercise their constitutionally protected rights is simply not a crime.”

“In fact, it is a historically grounded tradition in the very same social and political movements that the city of Atlanta prides itself on,” she said. “Someone had to bail out civil rights activists in the 60’s—I think we can all agree that community support isn’t a crime.”

And yet, I can almost guarantee that the cops who decided to do this will not face any serious repercussions. Police abuse of power is one of the biggest reasons people oppose Cop City, and look how they respond. In 2020, when there were protests against police brutality, the cops amped up the brutality, even shooting out people’s eyes. Now, in response to a community wanting a say over how public resources are used, they’re flagrantly violating peoples’ rights.

 

If you’re in the Atlanta area, consider showing up to city hall tomorrow. If you’re further out, and you have the resources, you can help by supporting the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, by signing on to the statement of solidarity with the movement, and by doing what you can to raise public awareness of what’s going on in Atlanta. Even if people don’t care about that city or the people in it, they should understand that everything happening there will happen everywhere else in the US as well, if they’re allowed to get away with it. I keep saying that those in power will use violence to keep that power, and this is part of that process. They are setting up to make cops more dangerous to USians, and they are flagrantly abusing their power to make sure that this goes through, no matter what the people of Atlanta want.

This is part of the climate fight, and it’s a battle we can ill afford to lose. A facility like Cop City is designed to make cops better at crushing movements for change, and in case you hadn’t noticed, we urgently need movements for change. Look into the issue if you haven’t, and try to find at least some way to help out. If you can’t do anything tomorrow, but you want to do something, there’s a week of action from June 24th to July 1st, and I believe actions outside of Atlanta, like demonstrations, are welcome as part of that. If you have questions, ask in the comments, and I’ll do what I can to provide answers.

 

A New Age of Fire and Floods

Many years ago, I suggested to my parents that they might want to have plans in case of future wildfires. Their response was that New Hampshire got enough rain to make that pretty unlikely, at least for a while. They were right, of course, and New Hampshire has not had a serious fire problem in the years since. This is a good thing, of course, but it looks like that good thing might be on its way out, because Nova Scotia is burning.

I’ve been up there once, during a summer vacation in my childhood. We spent a couple weeks there, in public campgrounds, and one of my biggest memories from that trip was that it was gray and rainy the whole time. Nova Scotia is a peninsular province that sticks out into the North Atlantic ocean, to the east of Maine, and I think it typically gets a bit more rain than southern New Hampshire. Everywhere has fires from time to time, but it’s not an area historically known for being on fire, even in the more toasty era of the last decade. Unfortunately, history’s lessons fall short, in the face of a warming event unlike anything our species has ever encountered, and Nova Scotia is burning.

Officials and climate experts in Nova Scotia, Canada on Tuesday pointed to numerous climate-related factors that have contributed to the wildfires that are raging in the province this week, forcing the evacuation of more than 16,000 people and destroying roughly 200 homes and other structures.

The Tantallon fire in the Halifax area and the Barrington Lake fire in the southwestern county of Shelburne have burned through a combined 25,000 acres in the Maritime province, which, as one firefighter told the Canadian newspaper SaltWire, has historically been far less likely to experience such blazes than landlocked western provinces.

“This the worst fire I’ve ever been on,” volunteer firefighter Capt. Brett Tetanish toldSaltWire. “I’ve been on other large fires in Nova Scotia, Porters Lake, we lost structures there, but you don’t see fires like this in Nova Scotia. You see these in Alberta.”

Tetanish described a “surreal” scene as he drove toward the Tantallon fire on Sunday evening.

“We’re driving on Hammonds Plains Road with fire on both sides of the road, structures on fire, cars abandoned and burnt in the middle of the road,” he toldSaltWire.

Other witnesses, including a filmmaker, posted videos on social media of “apocalyptic scenes” showing fires destroying homes and huge plumes of smoke rendering highways nearly invisible to drivers.

“I almost died,” said the filmmaker. “The fire is spreading, it’s very serious. We couldn’t see anything.”

Halfway through 2023, Nova Scotia has already experienced more wildfires than it did in all of 2022, according to the National Observer.

Karen McKendry, a wilderness outreach coordinator at the Ecology Action Center in Nova Scotia’s capital, Halifax, told the Observer the province has experienced hotter dryer weather than normal this spring, making it easier for fires to spread.

“People haven’t always, on a national scale, been thinking about Nova Scotia and wildfires,” McKendry said. “What dominates the consciousness, rightly so in Canada, is what’s happening out West. But with a warming climate and some drier seasons, this is going to become more common in Nova Scotia. So more fires, more widespread fires, more destructive fires from a human perspective as well.”

The province’s Department of Natural Resources and Renewables (DNRR) also warned last Friday that the wildfires were taking hold in the region less than a year after Hurricane Fiona downed what Premier Tim Houston called a “significant” number of trees across Nova Scotia.

“Fires in areas where Hurricane Fiona downed trees have the potential to move faster and burn more intensely, making them potentially more difficult to contain and control,” said the DNRR. “At this time, needles, twigs, leaves, etc., support fire ignition and spread. With high winds, the spread can be rapid and intense.”

Scientists last year linked warming oceans, fueled by the continued extraction of fossil fuels and emissions of planet-heating greenhouse gases, to Fiona’s destruction in Eastern Canada.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned Monday that the situation in Nova Scotia is “incredibly serious,” prompting Saman Tabasinejad, acting executive director of Progress Toronto, to point to Trudeau’s support for fossil fuel projects like the Trans Mountain Pipeline.

“This would be a great time to end fossil fuel subsidies and invest in a Green New Deal!” Tabasinejad said on Twitter.

Yes, yes it would.

This doesn’t mean that the east coast of North America is now as fire-prone as the west coast.  It’s not. What it does mean is that, as scientists have long predicted, the rules are changing. Climate-related disasters that used to be limited to certain parts of the world, are now showing up in new places. This is our world now. We’ve known this was coming for decades, and we know that it’s only going to get worse. That’s why I’m so convinced that we need to move farming indoors – where we grow our food right now depends almost entirely on historical climate conditions. This is happening right now, and the people running the world are all so stuck in the past, and so obsessed with their own power, that they are actively working to stop humanity from saving ourselves.

Mark Fisher describes “capitalist realism” as having an easier time imagining the end of the world, than the end of capitalism. It’s time we faced up to the fact that the capitalists have decided that if dealing with climate change requires an end to capitalism, then they would rather see the entire species killed off, than lose their power.

That should not be up to them

Are both sides the same? Yes, but also no.

I do not like the Democratic Party. As an institution, they are corrupt and disingenuous servitors of the upper class, who will demand party unity one moment, then support the loser of a primary over the winner, the next. They claim to care about issues like climate change, but continue expanding fossil fuel extraction, well past the point that will totally destroy humanity. They claim to care about student debt, but refuse to actually do anything about it. They claim to care about reproductive rights, but support anti-choice candidates, and every time they came into power over the last half-century, they insisted that abortion rights were safe, and it wasn’t the time to codify them into law.

For 50 years they did that, in the face of an open campaign to do exactly what has now been done.

I do not like the Democratic party, but- they are still better than the GOP. Not on everything, of course. They’ve been full partners in the long history of attacking left-wing countries, and supporting some of the worst dictators and war criminals on the planet, for example. But even on the issues I listed in the paragraph above, they are better than the GOP, in a very material way.

I mention that because a lot of people on the left, at least online, insist that there’s no difference, and that the Democrats only serve to stabilize the ways in which the Republicans make things worse. Obama’s use of drone warfare comes to mind, as does the continued abuse of children at the southern border. There are issues on which you can absolutely make that case. The thing is, though, they are not the only issues at play. Minnesota is probably the best example right now. The Democrats there are not perfect, but look at what they’ve been up to, and tell me you’d ever get any of it if the GOP was in power there.

The problem, as I see it, is that those people on the left are still stuck on individualism, and on the fantasy of achieving revolutionary change within the infrastructure of a representative democracy. For the first part, I get it. The Democratic Party fights hard to avoid any kind of real working class power in the United States, and voting for them implies that I’m OK with that. I’m not OK with that, I just consider those feelings to be less important than the increased safety or wellbeing that can come from the policies that Democrats do support. I don’t believe souls exist, so I’m not particularly concerned with “tainting” mine. For the second part, well, I understand why people think that way, but I think that they are wrong.

Take the Green Party. I know some people see them as spoilers, and I’m willing to believe that some people fund them as spoilers, but they do actually have a strategy for change, based on the rules of the electoral system in which they exist. The goal of a Green Party presidential candidate, at this stage, is not to get them into the White House, but rather to win at least 5% of the vote. That, under the current rules, would qualify them for official recognition as a national party, and for federal funds for future campaigns. Once they get there, they’ll have a much easier time spreading their message, and increasing their vote share to become a real power for change in the United States. It’s a plan for long-term change, within the rules that currently exist, it’s actually pretty reasonable. Further, I feel I should say that the folks I’ve seen associated with the Green Party in day-to-day life tend to be more politically active than average, working to make the world better.

I do, however, have a couple problems with that strategy.

The first is that I think it is naïve to assume that the rules won’t be changed. I’m sure many Greens don’t assume that, but would say that if that does happen, that injustice will bring them more support and attention. That might be true, but I’m not convinced. My bigger problem is that we are running out of time. I’m a big fan of long-term thinking, but not if you don’t account for what’s going on outside of the electoral rules. Remember, their plan is to get 5% of the vote, and work to grow from there. They wouldn’t need a majority to influence policy, and force coalition-building, but it would still take them time to build support, and make any significant changes. What’s more, every time they fall short of the mark, they have to wait another four years for another shot, and we are running out of time. The global temperature is rising fast, and as capitalism reaches crisis-levels of wealth concentration, authoritarianism is rising as well, with the rich beefing up their goon squads to hold on to their wealth and power.

We need revolutionary change, and that cannot come from within an electoral system designed to prevent such change. To me, “revolutionary change” means a change to the political and economic system on a scale that is generally associated with a successful revolutionary war. It does not mean change achieved through war. I do not want war. I don’t think anyone who sincerely wants the world to get better does want war. My preferred method would be some form of general strike – bringing the country to a halt, until corrupt rulers are replaced, and laws are changed. The degree to which there ends up being violence will depend pretty much entirely on the people who currently hold power. They have a long, and uninterrupted history of using violence to crush movements for change, and I see plenty of reason to believe that they would use lethal force to prevent a left-wing movement from succeeding in its goals. When I wrote my neglected direct action post, I used a shield as a metaphor, because I think that any effort at real systemic change will be subjected to violence, and I believe that people have a right to defend themselves.

So, if voting won’t get the change we need, why vote at all? Well, because it can get smaller changes, that will save or improve lives in the short term, which is a thing worth doing in itself. There’s a sort of freedom in realizing that the system is so corrupt and entrenched that voting will never bring the change I want to see. It means that I don’t have to pin all my hopes on a candidate, only to feel betrayed when they fall short of my expectations. Sure, I still get disappointed or angry when bad things happen, but my hope comes from the work that people are doing to organize, and to take direct action. It’s not a guaranteed win, of course, but by organizing around smaller-scale problems, like working conditions or local laws, we build the capacity to work together on much larger problems.

This started out as me just posting a video, but then I had things to say. Beau of the Fifth Column posted a video responding to someone who was having trouble seeing a difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and he said a lot of stuff that I agree with. It’s not surprising, considering that he’s been influential in my own political thought over the last couple years. It can be difficult to look at the world as it is, and not get sidetracked by all the complexity and horror, and I think Beau does a good job breaking it down.

Video: Supreme Court Guts Clean Water Act

I may dig into this more later, but the Supreme Court has launched another attack in their war on humanity. They’ve gutted the clean water act, in a move that puts a huge portion of US wetlands at risk, at a time when we need them more than ever. I’ve been expecting this shoe to drop for a while now, but what I did not expect was that Brett Kavanaugh, of all people, would be on the right side of this, and would be the one to correctly warn of the damage this ruling will do. Credit where it’s due, I guess, but that doesn’t do anything to limit the harm. The common saying is, “it’s going to get worse before it gets better” applies here, but I can’t help but feel that we’re running out of time for things to do anything but keep getting worse.

Global warming is driving insurers out of California

For as long as I’ve been paying attention, folks talking about climate change have been pointing to insurance companies as a way to track damage that might not otherwise be easy to see. If the planet’s temperature really was rising, and that was causing an increase in extreme weather, then those companies that insure against climate disasters would have to increase their rates and/or change their policies, to remain profitable. It’s one of those areas where society bumps up against the “natural world” with very little cushion, and sure enough, insurance companies have noticed the change. Take this Smithsonian article from back in 2013:

“Our business depends on us being neutral. We simply try to make the best possible assessment of risk today, with no vested interest,” says Robert Muir-Wood, the chief scientist of Risk Management Solutions (RMS), a company that creates software models to allow insurance companies to calculate risk. “In the past, when making these assessments, we looked to history. But in fact, we’ve now realized that that’s no longer a safe assumption—we can see, with certain phenomena in certain parts of the world, that the activity today is not simply the average of history.”

This pronounced shift can be seen in extreme rainfall events, heat waves and wind storms. The underlying reason, he says, is climate change, driven by rising greenhouse gas emissions. Muir-Wood’s company is responsible for figuring out just how much more risk the world’s insurance companies face as a result of climate change when homeowners buy policies to protect their property.

[…]

“Catastrophes are complex, and the kinds of things that happen during them are complex, so we are constantly trying to improve our modeling to capture the full range of extreme events,” Muir-Wood says, noting that RMS employs more than 100 scientists and mathematicians towards this goal. “When Hurricane Sandy happened, for instance, we already had events like Sandy in our models—we had anticipated the complexity of having a really big storm driving an enormous storm surge, even with wind speeds that were relatively modest.”

These models are not unlike those used by scientists to estimate the long-term changes our climate will undergo as it warms over the next century, but there’s one important difference: Insurance companies care mainly about the next year, not the next 100 years, because they mostly sell policies one year at a time.

But even in the short term, Muir-Wood’s team has determined, the risk of a variety of disasters seems to have already shifted. “The first model in which we changed our perspective is on U.S. Atlantic hurricanes. Basically, after the 2004 and 2005 seasons, we determined that it was unsafe to simply assume that historical averages still applied,” he says. “We’ve since seen that today’s activity has changed in other particular areas as well—with extreme rainfall events, such as the recent flooding in Boulder, Colorado, and with heat waves in certain parts of the world.”

Again, that article was published in 2013. Unfortunately, things have progressed since then, and I doubt you need me to tell you that. The most dramatic example, in the United States, is probably the growing California fire season, which has created truly hellish conditions, and given us this surreal and terrifying commute to work:

The image shows a number of cars on a freeway, slightly out of focus. It's dark, and the cars all have their lights on. In the background, the world is on fire. The hillside nearest the camera on the left of the image seems to be smouldering, more smoke and coal than fire. Beyond that, you can see a brighter orange, leading to yellow flames on the righthand side of the picture, illuminating the smoke that fills the sky. The cars are all driving straight towards the inferno. It's as if they're commuting into a fiery underworld.

The image shows a number of cars on a freeway, slightly out of focus. It’s dark, and the cars all have their lights on. In the background, the world is on fire. The hillside nearest the camera on the left of the image seems to be smouldering, more smoke and coal than fire. Beyond that, you can see a brighter orange, leading to yellow flames on the righthand side of the picture, illuminating the smoke that fills the sky. The cars are all driving straight towards the inferno. It’s as if they’re commuting into a fiery underworld

This picture captures something that has been bothering me since the pandemic started – the way we’re all forced to act as though everything’s fine. The pandemic was sort of an appetizer. We had our faces rubbed in the fact that the people running our world would happily see us dead, so long as it didn’t disrupt their lives. After all, they work so hard to ensure that there are always people without jobs, so if some of them, they can be replaced.

The main course, of course, is climate change. The bit of the world you live in can be on fire, but you’re expected to go to keep on working, because profit is what matters. Human extinction is a real possibility here, and every delay in action makes it more likely. We know what’s causing this, and we know that the capitalist obsession with overproduction and endless growth is the primary driver of the problem. And yet, people are expected to continue adding fuel to that fire, because it’s the only way they’re allowed to survive.

This can’t go on forever. Everything is not normal, and a new announcement from State Farm indicates that California, at least, has reached a crisis point:

State Farm has stopped accepting homeowner insurance applications in California, citing the growing risk from catastrophes like wildfires and the rising cost to rebuild.

“State Farm General Insurance Company made this decision due to historic increases in construction costs outpacing inflation, rapidly growing catastrophe exposure, and a challenging reinsurance market,” the insurance giant said in a statement on Friday.

“It’s necessary to take these actions now to improve the company’s financial strength,” the company added.

According to the Insurance Information Institute, State Farm was the leading company offering home insurance in California.

The decision to forgo coverage went into effect on Saturday. It applies to both personal and business properties. The company said it will continue to serve existing customers, as well as offer personal auto insurance.

Make no mistake – this policy, if it’s maintained, is a phase-out. They will lose customers, for one reason or another, and they do not intend to replace them. This doesn’t mean that California is uninhabitable, obviously. It doesn’t even guarantee that home and business insurance is no longer profitable in California, but it does mean that a large and successful insurance corporation thinks that it will be unprofitable, in the not-so-distant future. It looks like this year is expected to be more or less normal, as wildfires go, and apparently El Niño years have fewer fires, so hopefully California will get something resembling a break from the fires, but the warming continues, and the insurance industry knows that.

The measure is the latest development in what has been a years-long issue in California: insurance companies dropping homeowners because of the growing risk of wildfires.

In recent years, the state has witnessed some of the most destructive wildfire seasons in its history. In 2018, the Camp Fire destroyed 11,000 homes and at one point, displaced nearly 50,000 people. In its aftermath, insurance companies saw huge losses, causing premiums to go up and toughening eligibility requirements to get covered.

California officials have attempted to minimize such efforts, by temporarily barring insurers from dropping customers in areas hit by wildfires and directing insurance companies to provide discounts.

But as wildfires rage on in the state, so has the issue of insurance affordability and availability. Last year, American International Group notified the state’s insurance regulator that it will exit the homeowners market.

The efforts they mention, by California officials, seem to be a misguided attempt to cling to normalcy. I have no sympathy for the insurance corporations, but our government should be focused on climate change, not the financial tool we’re currently using as a bandaid for it. That means ending fossil fuel use, yes, but thanks to the negligence, corruption, and greed of our “leaders”, we also have to spend money adapting to a warming world. We had a chance to delay or even avoid this, but that chance was squandered, so here we are. Capitalism has no solution to climate change; all it can do is find ways to keep the rich and powerful, rich and powerful. This insurance exodus will discourage people from moving to California, and encourage people living there to leave, but it will do so slowly and painfully, and it will not address the actual problem, or help those people set up in a less flammable location. It’s not a solution, it’s just corporations putting profit first, as they always do. In that regard, one could argue that this is just business as usual; corporations do what they want, and we just have to go along with it.

Our overlords can force us to go through the motions of normalcy. They have the power to do that, and we lack the power to resist.

For now.

But the world is changing, and it’s getting a lot harder to pretend otherwise. It may be that those changes would spur reactionary politics even without the support of capitalists, but that support does exist, and at least part of it comes from their fear of us. The folks at the top have always practiced class solidarity, and have never stopped waging a class war against workers. They’re scared now, to the point that many are actively supporting fascism, because they are seeing solidarity form among workers, and they fear that organized, collective power that follows. That doesn’t mean we’re guaranteed to win, of course, but it should serve as a reminder that victory is not out of reach. With solidarity and organization, we can build the power to resist, and to bring about the scale of change that’s needed, if we want to survive.

Because I’ve been focused on a novel for the last month, the quality of posts has been lagging, and there will be a few more days of that before I go back to normal. Part of the reason that I feel this is necessary is that this blog is currently my only source of income, and it’s not enough. I’m hoping that (assuming AI doesn’t flood the market completely), I can come closer to making ends meet via book sales, in a year or two. If you want me to invest more time and energy in this blog, the best way for you to tell me that, is by signing up at patreon.com/oceanoxia. There aren’t currently a lot of fancy benefits, but you’d be joining a rarefied group of people, and proving that you also have excellent taste!

Video: The Aristocratic Propaganda of Downton Abbey

I’ve never watched Downton Abbey. I did see Gosford Park, which is a sort of predecessor, but for all I heard a lot about the show, it never caught my interest. What does interest me is how it operates as propaganda. I knew that it cast a wealthy English family as the heroes of the story, but I honestly had no idea that it was literally written by a member of the House of Lords. The video below isn’t really commentary on whether or not it’s a good or fun show, but rather an examination of the show’s political messaging, and of how it supports the interests of its aristocratic author.

Video: Life at the Foot of a Literal Mountain of Trash

I’ve got a few fiction projects that I’ve put on the back burner over the last year or so. There’s the flooded NYC series, my long-neglected space-station B&B series, and then there’s the Vista series, which has yet to see the light of day. Vista is a town in the American Midwest, a couple hundred years in the future. It’s a company town, that lives entirely off of sorting trash, while struggling to survive in a much hotter world. The trash is brought there from all over the world, including from a nearby city that’s been built to ward off the high temperatures that plague the trash-pickers.

This basic scenario is one that already exists in a number of places around the world, where wealthy nations pay poorer ones to take the trash and “recyclables” that they don’t want to deal with. I talk a lot about how we need to figure out ways to do things, like mining, in less destructive ways. Waste disposal is absolutely one of those things, and figuring it out could go a long way to reducing our need for new resource extraction, because of the large amount of materials just sitting around in landfills and other dumping sites. In the meantime, we have a global capitalist system that depends on creating and maintaining extreme poverty, and this is part of what that looks like – people doing dangerous, disgusting work, because the system in which we live gives them no better option:

Child Calls Police for Help, Gets Shot

Once upon a time, when I was but a child, I called the cops on my brother’s friends due to a misunderstanding.

My family lived for about a decade in South Medford, Massachusetts. That home was actually pretty near the Somerville flat where I lived prior to leaving the US, and while it’s not super close to any subway stops, it’s not super far, either – about half an hour to Davis Square if you’re walking, or a 10 minute drive. My brother is five years older than me, and he had a pretty tight group of friends at the time, who were scheduled to come over on that fateful evening. My parents got a call to drive over to Davis to pick up a couple of said friends, and so they went, along with my brother, knowing that they’d only be gone for 20 minutes, and that I would be fine just reading in my room.

Or so we thought.

I was doing my thing, lying on the floor and reading one of the Redwall books, when I heard a clatter. A moment later there was another, like something had hit my second story window. I poked my head up to look outside, and sure enough, there were a bunch of people throwing pebbles at my window. Naturally, I freaked out, dropped to the floor, crawled to the lamp, and turned it off.

I could now hear someone pounding on the back door, underneath my bedroom, and a man’s accented voice shouting to be let in. I was terrified, so I scampered to the phone, and called the fire department. I didn’t know 911 at the time, and the fire department’s number was written on the phone, so that’s what I went with. I told them what was happening, more or less as I’ve laid it out here, and they assured me that they were sending a police officer.

The cops got there at around the same time as my parents, I think, and it was a little while before it was made clear to me what had happened. The mysterious strangers trying to break into my home, were actually another group of my brother’s friends, being dropped off by a parent, who understandably thought they were expected. The police questioned me separately from my parents, assuming that this was some sort of domestic dispute, but things were eventually cleared up, and life went on. For quite a while, once I understood why they’d questioned me separately, it honestly made me feel good about police, that they would think to do that.

I’m telling you all this because a news story caught my eye, and made me think of it. An 11-year-old boy in Mississippi called the police for help with a domestic dispute, and the police “helped” by shooting him. The kid survived, but he’s recovering from a collapsed lung, liver damage, and broken ribs. He called for help, just like I did, and when “help” arrived, it shot him.

The boy was given a cellphone by his mother and told to call the police during a domestic disturbance involving the father of another one of her children, Moore said. After the child called 911, an Indianola police officer who was identified by the attorney as Greg Capers “had his gun blazing” upon arrival at the home at around 4 a.m., Moore said.

When Nakala Murry, the boy’s mother, told the officer that no one in the house was armed, the officer yelled out that anyone in the home should come out with their hands up, Moore said.

Even though Aderrien adhered to the officer’s commands and had his hands up, Capers shot him in the chest, according to the family and Moore.

“His words were: ‘Why did he shoot me? What did I do?’ and he started crying,” the boy’s mother said at a news conference this week.

The Indianola Board of Aldermen voted this week to place Capers on paid administrative leave while the case is investigated by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. It’s unclear whether he will face additional discipline or possible termination.

It’s easy to think that that could have been me, but honestly? It probably never would have been.

I’m white, you see, and this kid is black. Odds are we’ll never be able to definitively prove that that was a factor, but given history, I see no reason to give the shooter the benefit of the doubt. Aderrien Murry did everything right, every step of the way, and the police officer who was supposedly sent there to help him, shot him instead. The police chief said it was “extremely tragic on both sides”, because of course we have to consider the feelings of that poor cop! I can already hear the defense being built. They’ll say that the cop misheard the mother and thought everyone in the house was armed, or that Aderienn is “large and intimidating for an 11 year old”. There’s always some reason why it was perfectly understandable for a cop to shoot someone; why any reasonable person would have seen a frightened, unarmed child, and feared for their lives.

This isn’t something that reform can fix. An armed goon, trained to kill, should never have been the first responder to a call like this. When people argue against defunding or abolishing the police, they always talk about the harm they believe would follow, but there comes a point at which fear of the unknown can lead us to support far greater harm than could ever come from the changes that scare us so. Across much of the United States, the police are an occupying force, and one that increasingly resembles a military force. They actively oppose efforts at reform or oversight, and if they do manage to do good, it’s largely an accident of them being the go-to first responders for every conceivable crisis. If you throw cops at literally every problem, they’re bound to solve at least some of them. Police must be defunded, and their resources spent on addressing things that cause crime.

I’ll leave you with this thought: incidents like this may be a minority of police interactions, but the damage they do ripples out. Even discounting the trauma suffered by Aderrien, what happens the next time Nakala Murry fears her ex might turn violent? Do you think she’ll call the cops? Would you? What about the neighbors and friends of that family? What about other people who hear the story, and are in similar situations?

Society needs first responders, but police do more harm than good.