Rose Levinson reflects on the recent impact of the Black Lives Matter movement and reads the poem 'Riot' by Gwendolyn Brooks.
Updated: Aug 2, 2024
Updated: Aug 2, 2024
Rose Levinson reflects on the recent impact of the Black Lives Matter movement and reads the poem 'Riot' by Gwendolyn Brooks.
Updated: Aug 2, 2024
During the lockdown, even ageing was suspended. Everything stopped. No visits to doctors, dentists. No worries that my pains were heart related or that night terrors were symptoms of mental imbalance. We were swaddled in paused time. And now it’s over, I feel less safe, sadder, older and not much wiser.
I’m grieving the world I lost – tube rides all over London; careless changing at Kings Cross; sitting in Brick and Olive Cafe for hours, surrounded by the unemployed and the old; hopping on the bus to Ally Pally, thinking of nothing but walking in the park; meeting up for tea and sharing a single cake; getting away for the week to Scotland; planning a trip to California to see longtime friends and meet a new baby. Opening the front door and not backing up five metres. Walking the streets without moving onto the road as someone approaches. Joking with the greengrocer and letting our breath go where it will.
In fact, some of this has resumed. But the old ease is gone, replaced by a wariness of the stranger in the cafe, the cyclist on the path, the laughter of the server without a mask. I go about the world, but it’s smaller now. Everything feels like it might be tainted by the Covid germ. Recently I went with friends to the Tate Museum. We wore masks in an under-peopled gallery. We observed signs cautioning us not to stand too close. Our coffee in the cafe was subdued, the masks around our necks tattered amulets. This is our new normal, and I shall no doubt get used to it. But it’s a slow taking-in.
The first week after lockdown, I was thrown off-base, not sure where to go and what to do. The government threw open many doors. But who in their right mind trusts today’s feckless, corrupt governments? We’re in a time when everything is broken, fragmented into unrecognizable pieces.
It will be many years before another period of stability. And that stability will not look like it did before the pandemic. That prelapsarian time held some cohesion. I could count on dying in my bed of some familiar disease, say of the heart. That may still be the case. But a microscopic thing may invade me, taking my breath in a way I never expected. It maddens me that even my fantasies of how I’d depart this planet are called into question now. Is nothing certain?
Of course nothing is certain. Never was. Everything shifts, moving toward final dissolution. I’m not optimistic by temperament, and certainly am not going to start trying for a calm acceptance now. No, I’m one of those ‘do not go gentle into that good night’ people. I have a finely honed sense of outrage, based partly on an arrogance about my own intelligence. Like others who share my stew of characteristics, the struggle is to channel this energy into something useful. That battle goes on. At the moment, the bad guys are winning. I’m irritable, negative, pissed off.
Perhaps this is, after all, a good time to be old. Perhaps I’ll avoid experiencing the full-blown horrors of climate catastrophe. Possibly the social justice protests this time will make fundamental changes. I push myself to find the positive, and I often do. The other side of my arrogance is a belief in my efficacy in making a difference with others. It’s of some comfort.
But the vial of bitterness is never far away, the rage at life’s unfairness. I try not to lift it to my lips, but sometimes it insists I drink. And then I have to remember: there are still conversations to have, sentences to write, children to nurture. And sometimes, there will be the sense that this life is not just full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
………………………..
Rose Levinson, August 2020
CONTACT US
We welcome your reactions and thoughts to any and all postings. Please email us at editors@emergingvoices.co.uk or respond via our social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Updated: Aug 2, 2024
Sydney Charles has been active in climate campaigning for over ten years. She’s devastated that, whilst so much is known about solutions, so little is done by the powers-that-be. Indeed she is horrified. Even as the world needs to recover from the ongoing breakdown of the global system, many governments are awarding vast sums to polluting industries. Sydney is active in North London, arranging local events, working with community energy groups, and continually lobbying and protesting for carbon reductions at the national level. She also tracks the all important UN negotiations. Sydney tries to balance the continuous struggle between supporting positive actions and battling the malevolent forces of media and billionaires. Her passion for a Green New Deal has been overtaken by a passion for a green recovery from the pandemic – our only chance.
Her twitter handle is @sydcharles
Almost five years ago in Paris, in December 2015, 192 countries agreed to produce a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) pledging to bring down their Greenhouse Gas emissions. These ‘Paris Pledges’ can be found here – in the little known archive on the little known UN web site.
The Paris Agreement makes clear that pledges might not be sufficient to limit global temperature increases to 1.5°C. (footnote 1)
Frequent heat waves, fires, hurricanes, flooding, glaciers melting and cold ‘in the wrong places’ are signs we ignore at our peril. Most alarmingly, they are happening right now as we approach just 1°C increase in carbon emissions. We can no longer expect to live in the ‘green and pleasant land’ of our youth. But the looming global catastrophe could be minimised and delayed if every government was pressured into pledging to do much more, much sooner.
Panic and fear would appropriately ensue among billions if global citizens took in the fact that the aggregate of all the pledged emission reductions ‘bakes in’ emission increases leading to global warming of around 4°C, rather than the aim of only 1.5 °C. This will make vast areas of Earth uninhabitable.
The Paris Agreement required every Government to submit a new pledge by 2020. That is NOW. They were to include greenhouse gas reduction strategies through 2050. But already that may be too late. Many governments clearly have no intention of making more ambitious pledges. Indeed, many are not attempting to honour the pledges they have already made. footnote 2
Activists in every country, and the diaspora of every country, need to know what their climate abatement pledge contains and to pressure their government into submitting an update pledging maximum action in minimum time.
Increasingly, the public is developing a sense of anxiety about Climate Breakdown and Ecological Damage. But most citizens have a ‘non-existing level of knowledge’ about what actions their government has pledged that might pull us back from the brink. Most don’t know their government is pledging the minimum, whilst continuing to add to greenhouse gases. This inexorably warms the world, which disrupts weather patterns, which causes death and destruction.
As Greta Thunberg stated, “Public opinion is what runs the free world, and the public opinion necessary is today non-existing, the level of knowledge is too low.” (Time.com July 2020)
How to ensure that your government pledge maximises emission reduction and maximises sequestration:
First find the pledge for your country here and get all your contacts to find theirs
Second analyse the pledges with people who understand the country and the causes of climate change
Third publicise how inadequate the pledges are and the inevitable dangers to the country and the world
Fourth lobby and protest – either from within or from outside the country
It is in the interest of fossil fuel companies to control the message which gets accepted in governments. They insist that controlling green gas emissions is ‘not urgent’ and ‘would cost too much’. The huge benefits of improved air quality, more comfortable homes, better access to power for the disadvantaged, less conflict over oil are messages that get lost, distorted, buried under corporate hype.
Until the message gets through to every global citizen and to every politician on the urgency for public, ambitious climate abatement pledges, we will continue on the inexorable path of increasing climate damage. Life on earth will be impossible in at least some regions, and the planet we rely on will no longer be hospitable to our continuing presence.
Check out your government’s commitment to reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions!
John Kerry signed the Paris Agreement for the USA with his granddaughter in April 2016. The US is now on track to cancel that agreement.
(footnote 1)
Paris Agreement on aim and shortfall (p2)
Emphasizing with serious concern the urgent need to address the significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above preindustrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels.
(footnote 2)
Climate Action Tracker July 2020
CONTACT US
We welcome your reactions and thoughts to any and all postings. Please email us at editors@emergingvoices.co.uk or respond via our social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.