Climate Change: the Ultimate "Crime Against Humanity"

JOIN CODEPINK, WORLD CAN’T WAIT, OCCUPY SF and others for our weekly (most Wednesdays)
PEACE VIGIL. STAND OR SIT WITH US, HAND OUT FLYERS OR JUST BE THERE IN SOLIDARITY.
EVERYONE WELCOME.
Signs and flyers provided.

Climate Change: the Ultimate "Crime Against Humanity”

“For a society so worried about things that can kill us, we've focused very little of our attention on the thing that surely will,” notes Tom Engelhardt, author of The United States of Fear. “Warming of the planet — thanks to the fossil fuel system we live by and the greenhouse gases it deposits in the atmosphere — is already doing real damage to our world. . .

“When we speak of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), we usually think of weapons — nuclear, biological, or chemical — that are delivered in a measurable moment in time. Consider climate change, then, a WMD on a particularly long fuse, already lit and there for any of us to see.”

But fear should never be the primary motivation of our actions, says Eddie S. Glaude Jr., chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University:

“The real danger is that the way we live our lives as Americans, no matter our optimism about the future, is no longer sustainable. . . We can’t continue to live with the current level of income inequality. Hard working people are working longer hours for less pay. And politicians and their benefactors continue to argue for trade policies that have decimated the working class in this country. We can’t continue to lock up black and brown people or watch them killed in cold blood by people sworn to protect us or fail to publicly educate all of our children. We can’t continue to bomb people around the world into oblivion.”

“War and militarism also fuel climate change,” writes Gar Smith, co-founder of Environmentalists Against War. The U.S. military is the largest institutional consumer of oil in the world. “Oil barrels and gun barrels both pose a threat to our survival,” Smith adds. “If we hope to stabilize our climate, we will need to start spending less money on war.”

We should not cower in fear, counsels Professor of Theology and Culture Mark Lewis Taylor. “Privileged citizens and residents need to bare their rage at the structures of abuse. . .

“Those most vulnerable to a Trump regime are not powerless. They are not primarily — surely not only — victims. They are also resisters with powers for throwing off oppression, building movements for justice and to redress wrongs and imagine new political life. All the while they can also extend at times astonishing acts of love and human dignity.”