Whatever Happened to Reducing Plastics?

We're extremely susceptible to manipulation, to be sure. Today I see in The Guardian's lead headline that there are people in parks that are not keeping a minimum of 2m away from others and are "very selfish". In practical terms it would be all but impossible to get the virus at a distance of 2m outdoors. The Guardian is, of course, campaigning to get people confined indoors, in a state of virtual martial law like in Spain or Italy, although clearly the measures taken in these countries have not proved helpful. And no one spares a thought for those whose homes or family members (if they even have homes and families) will make confinement far more unhealthy or unsafe than being in the park.

Only a few weeks ago we were obsessing over plastics, finally and rightfully ditching the throw-away plastic bag for a reusable bag and changing over to less packaged purchases at the shops. We were fretting over plastics bobbing about in the sea as, even more seriously, our planet burned. Now we're eyeing others with distrust, even dislike, as we glide past each other at the supermarket, throwing millions of flimsy plastic gloves away every day, and the planet is still burning.

Our present model of life, neoliberalism, has been going for some 50 years. It ratcheted up previous forms of capitalism and preached the infantile notion that greed was good, that rich people were successful and worthy of great respect and emulation, and that the world was a huge playground that could be trashed because a new toy would always come along once it was economically viable to produce one.

We have elevated real freaks to economic positions they should never have reached in the natural order of things. These odd-looking, unempathetic weirdos have been allowed to run riot and buy political power or directly run the world. Think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Mnuchin (Goldman Sachs banker, currently US Secretary of the Treasury), the list could include just about anyone who is close to power and they are all aberrations. We have idiots and buffoons who have won political positions of importance solely because they were born rich and because we have a political system that generally opposes two candidates from two parties that are in fact the same party: the Corporate Party.

If you think that the coronavirus crisis is simply a health crisis and that once we are past it life will go on more or less as before, stop reading right here. Things are not going back to where they were a few weeks ago. The coronavirus is in fact a minor health event being used to reset our western world to a new world order. Our economies were already lurching from one huge crisis to another. We were barely patching things up after the 2008 meltdown, when the new crisis struck, long before the coronavirus arrived on the scene. Western economic markets were already falling heavily when the coronavirus appeared, and MSM propaganda outlets duly started ramping up the panic, while there were in actual fact only a handful of affected people. We now, of course, have a truly huge economic crisis, not remotely caused by the coronavirus which has only brought it forward.

The perfect storm of environmental degradation and climate breakdown, along with economic meltdown, together with AI having made almost all of us obsolete, and 5G making us easily controllable, means that we are on the cusp of an enormous change, one that has been chosen without our participation in the debate. Capitalism is entirely indifferent to our fate. If our existence becomes unprofitable for the very rich, we will be eliminated.

We have had an opportunity to seize this unique moment, in which nothing, absolutely nothing, about the current order is working for the 99%, and do something about it. Once we are contained within our homes, not allowed to associate with others, that moment may well be lost. Any solution to all these truly massive problems will be imposed from above and will not be to our benefit.

We allowed huge inequality to arise, hoodwinked by the absurd analogy that a rising tide raises all boats, absurd because wealth is a zero sum concept. If we all have a million euros, then a million euros is no longer worth very much. If we want to think that money is merely the equivalent of what you can buy with it, this finite planet is the limit of our collective wealth. The huge inequality we did not stop in time allowed an new plutocracy to arise, global in many senses, and they will do literally anything to protect their wealth. We have become collateral damage.

Once the coronavirus crisis is over, when we finally notice that the overwhelmed hospitals we are seeing on TV were already overwhelmed before it started, the merry-go-round will not start up again. We might think it has but we have now shown how easily manipulated we are, and how easily controlled.