Babble, 2025-07-25 0751h

It's hard not to get confrontational when I see some folk in North Carolina complaining about how hard the region has been getting hit by climate breakdown recently. There are folk who I am, or used to be, mutuals with, posting about it, and it's just… hard not to jump in and be like, "Hey, do you regret not putting more effort into organizing against these things earlier, like when I was living in the region, screaming about how the models were underestimating how bad things would get and how quickly?"

Because I was in the region, spearheading guerilla land use projects and trying to agitate political "radicals" toward the same, and it did not work. When I put in requests for specific help to deal with the legal and material consequences of doing guerilla work without an adequate support network, I was ignored, or told that I should have prepared myself better for such consequences, since they're obvious.

And it's my fault, for believing that the political rhetoric people used online would relate to how they'd chose to act.

Anyway, it's tough sitting with like, the names of people I know declined to do anything to help someone organize climate adaptation in a region without any organized climate adaptation and are now trying to step into that organizer role themselves, as though they aren't responsible for its absence today.

And it's tough because what passes for mutualism in America is so loose and so subsumed within normative power dynamics, that these folk will totally get away with being the climate adaptation leaders of the second half of the decade, because they were the same folk who prevented climate adapting mutualism in the first half.

Just consider, the next time you see some white settler with a job complaining about how hard climate breakdown is making it for them to maintain their consumerist delusions of being engaged with climate adaptation, that they might personally have declined to let someone camp in their lawn to steward a nearby watershed, because "property rights" said it was wrong to do so. That they might have chosen to go to their dayjob rather than listen to anyone explain how dire the environmental system is. How they continue to go to their dayjob rather than listen to anyone.

Most of all, though, I'm angry because it's harder than being sad: sad for all the people in the region who don't wake up with the privilege to choose how they'll ignore and defer crises that day. It's hard to not just have sympathy for those who truly can't make a different move, and let the feelings end there, in a warm and fuzzy sense of compassion.

But that doesn't give me anything to do. It's harder to be angry at the people who maybe could do better and simply aren't. It implies that I have to do something about it, even if that something is just, get a little confrontational with my babblings.

But shit. Someone should. There are a lot of cowards who have been living like cowards their whole lives, and platforms and social norms collaborate to let them seem like the bravest fuckers around.

But they aren't, and tbh, as someone who is getting older (at least as far as political radicals go), I am ready for young people to start demanding of everyone older than them: "If you know so much about what's wrong and how it should be better, how come you didn't do that shit?"

Climate breakdown is not news. Liberalism being fascistic is not news. America being racist and imperialist is not news. They haven't been news for anyone currently living. Anyone presenting it that way is hiding something, if only their own guilt over their complicity, and you should call them on it.

This is me taking a step toward calling folk on it. I hope the folk who are fretting at young folk about climate breakdown today, so they can advocate for elections and recycling and whatever crap, who ignored me fretting about it 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15, 20… see this post and realize that while they can lie to Zoomers and Alpha, there are some of of your contemporaries who see how shamefully you've used this life you've been given, and we're appalled at the low moral standards you hold yourself to.