David Davis
When I was 19, my dad and I had an argument about climate change.
It’s real, I said.
It’s not, he insisted.
We were outside my apartment complex in Davis, CA, and the sky was perfect blue. There was no such thing as fire season back then, not the way we know it today, not the kind that travels across continents to expose uninitiated cities to a shiny new face of the lament configuration.
To call our conversation an argument would imply that either of us had evidence to support our case, but since mine was as disreputable, in his eyes, as his was in mine, we were quickly at an impasse. If we were to agree to disagree, we would have to engage in our argument based on the established hierarchy between us: I would take his word, as I always had, and he would decide whether mine was good enough to be taken.
How do you know it’s not real? I demanded.
Well, said my dad, I have a college degree…
Indignant at this fallacy, I remember feeling a lick of panic. Was this the mind on whom I had based my worldview, my values, my intellectual pursuits? He hadn’t even been around for his college degree (which was, in his defense, agronomy) because he worked full time as a lumberjack and a redacted to put himself through school, same as me (the full-time part, not the lumberjack and redacted part). My own degree—still unassured because I’d already dropped out for the first time due to lack of funds—was suspicious even in utero. In his case, college was a symbol of class mobility and intellectual authority. In mine, all it did was prove that I thought I was smarter and better and fancier than the people who raised me.
We went around and around, but never settled on who was right. Eventually my dad went home, and I went back inside, probably to talk to the bugs I thought were living in my walls. That argument, which was far less charged than the ones to follow, was not the one that ended our relationship1. But I always think of it whenever the the climate catastrophe, as Democracy Now! refers to it, moves a little closer to home. Fearful of fire, smoke, or storm, my first emotion is anger, at my dad! As if the whole thing is his fault; as if, he had only believed me back in 2007, we wouldn’t be here now.
I’ve begun paying attention to who I get angry with when something bad happens, whether the crisis is personal or geopolitical (whenever these things can be differentiated). The state, and the corporations and billionaires that run it, the cops and the collaborators—those are the ones who are responsible, and more importantly, continue to impede people’s movements to do something. But my immediate fear locates an infinitesimally small, and obviously hyper-personal, scapegoat, some boomer redneck I haven’t talked to in years. Fearful, I transform the world into my own suffering. Ineffectual, I superimpose myself on the bigness of this injustice.
This is different from empathy, I think, because it does not motivate me to action, other than blame, and is ultimately about me, rather than other people. And I do think we all have to compartmentalize sometimes. But when I examine the effects of this tendency in myself, I see that it does not galvanize me to action, or connection, or even the dreaded self-care. Instead, it permits me to continue to rage against an insignificant person.
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If you’re looking for significant people, I’ll direct your attention to the ongoing #StopCopCity movement in Atlanta, which hit its most recent roadblock when the Atlanta City Council voted to fund the deeply unpopular police training center.
If I had to pick, it would probably have been the one about Trayvon Martin, who was murdered in cold blood by George Zimmerman at 17—at the time, the same age as my half-sister, my dad’s youngest child. I thought this similarity would affect with him as it affected me. It didn’t.
godDAMN this is great. thank you