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Title: Every Day in the Present! Author: Anonymous Date: Autumn 2019 Language: en Topics: climate change, climate crisis, protest, Social Movements, future, Munich, Tormenta, The Local Kids, The Local Kids #5 Source: Translated for The Local Kids, Issue 5 Notes: First appeared untitled in Tormenta (Gegen die Herrschaft ĂĽber Mensch und Natur, MĂĽnchen), Issue 1, Spring 2019
For weeks – now even for months – every Friday people go on the streets
to protest against the destruction of the planet we’re living on.
This destruction appears in a thousand ways and ever more blatant. We
experience it more and more often not only through the outpouring of the
media, but also in our own lives. Also when perhaps many of us didn’t
experience one of the environmental disasters that increased as a
consequence of climate change, we are seeing extreme weather more
clearly for example. And we’re feeling the effects more strongly that
living in this world has on our bodies and minds – in a world that is
increasingly grey, suffocating, hectic, calculated. A world that is
determined through technology, by “practical constraints” and through
other persons. Life in the city where the air is so polluted that
breathing becomes hard and where its ocean of concrete and its never
ending noise tortures our senses, is only one of the daily examples for
lots of us.
These aren’t first and foremost problems and conditions of the future,
but already of the present.
And indeed, there I see one of the problems with the content of the
FridaysForFuture marches; when the attention is mainly directed to the
future, how shitty everything is already is easily camouflaged.
They talk to us about the future to make us accept a miserable present;
parents and teachers (“Get your diploma so you can find a good job”),
employers (“retirement pension”), politicians (“climate targets for
20XX”), priests (“paradise after death”) and scientists (“the bright
future that is bestowed upon us through intelligent, nano and
biotechnology”).
A present in which we spent days in boring classrooms, in which we obey
and leave experiences unmade, in which our lives are so tedious and our
friendships so superficial that even smartphones seem more exciting, in
which our planet gets destroyed more every day, in which every day
animal species go extinct, people starve, are forced to flee, die in
wars, get locked up... and in which the places where we live are already
hostile to life and get each day more hostile, which we only endure
while we’re already deadened or escape into artificial, technological
worlds of illusions (social media, television, Netflix, Virtual Reality,
video games etc.).
What is robbed from us by politics and science – and to whom the
FridaysForFuture marches direct their demands – is first of all a
self-determined life here and now. In this world which they defend and
represent, there can hardly be a question of taking our lives in our own
hands.
When one focuses their attention on the future, one maybe can hope that
politics will change something, that the economy will change something,
that scientific progress will change something... But then when we look
at the present, we lose any trust in them. Because it becomes clear to
us (or should become clear to us) how unbearable everything is; what
they are right now doing with the world and our lives! And that to put
hope in them is pointless. Politics, economy and science - which are
mainly about the exercise of power and the accumulation of money – will,
in the future as today, when necessary, go over the corpses of animals,
humans and planets (also maybe in more sophisticated and better
camouflaged ways...).
Isn’t it then already time to consider the possibilities of how to
resist the devastation that rages over our earth and inside ourselves?
And that in doing so we don’t make ourselves depend on the insight and
will of those who even in this devastation see a financial, political or
strategical benefit?
Possibilities in which we don’t direct ourselves to those who in the
present make sure that everything is what it is and instead take this
change into our own hands, if we want change in the future?
Not only skipping classes! Let’s also skip the future and present which
others prescribe for us and let’s find own paths to shape our lives and
a world worth living for.