Warmth for Disillusionment: The Traumas of Political Disaffection

Collectively, human existence is still essentially analogous to a cafeteria lineup consisting of diversely societally represented people, all adamantly arguing over which identifiable person should be at the front and, conversely, at the back of the line. Many of them further fight over to whom amongst them should go the last piece of quality pie and how much they should have to pay for it — all the while the interstellar spaceship on which they’re all permanently confined, owned and operated by (besides the wealthiest passengers) the fossil fuel industry, is on fire and toxifying at locations not normally investigated. As a species, we can be so heavily preoccupied with our own individual little worlds, however overwhelming to us, that we will miss the biggest of crucial pictures.

Due to the Only If It’s In My Own Back Yard mindset, the prevailing collective attitude, however implicit or subconscious, basically follows: ‘Why should I care — my kids are alright?’ or ‘What is in it for me, the taxpayer, if I support programs for other people’s troubled families?’ While some people will justify it as a normal thus moral human evolutionary function, the self-serving OIIIMOBY can debilitate social progress, even when such progress is so desperately needed (i.e. trying to moderate manmade global warming thus extreme weather events). And it seems this distinct form of societal penny wisdom but pound foolishness is a very unfortunate human characteristic that’s likely with us to stay. ...

Meantime, the anti-democratic goal(s) of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro may be yet another instance of that potentially very dangerous philosophy: the end justifies the means. The most frightful example of that philosophical justification is the pogrom, the primary implementers of which know they’re committing mass murder yet still genuinely perceive it all as part of an ultimately greater, moral good.

He's also the same despot who allows the Amazonian rainforest to be razed by both meat farmers and wildfires.

In the midst of yet another unprecedented wildfire two summers ago, the evangelical-Christian president declared that his presidency — and, I presume, all of the formidable environmental damage he inflicts while in power — is “fulfilling a mission from God”. [Similarly, Canada’s previous prime minister, the thinly-veiled-theocratic also-evangelical-Christian Stephen Harper, was unrelenting in his pro-fossil-fuel/anti-natural-environment war against science.]

There’s a generally shared yet bizarre belief held amongst such people that to defend the natural environment from the planet’s greatest polluters, notably big fossil fuel, is to go against God’s will and is therefore inherently evil. Some even credit the bone-dry-vegetation areas uncontrollably burning in California each year to some divine wrath upon collective humankind’s ‘sinfulness’.

Ergo, there’s a serious hazard in such theologically-inclined people getting into and remaining in high office. ...

I, one who believes in Christ's unmistakable miracles, am greatly stressed by all of this.