At the end of the hugely under-viewed 2021 film Don’t Look Up – the character played by Leonardo Di Caprio says this line
“The thing of it is… we really did have everything didn’t we”
But its importance is far more than a memorable ending. What the character is saying is that we threw it all away. You’ll find similar lines in other dystopian and post apocalyptic films and books. The main protagonist, played by Denzel Washington in The Book of Eli says “We threw away things people kill each other for now…”
And that is exactly what we’re doing.
It seems to epitomise what we have done for decades and are doing faster now than at any time in human history – even including the world wars that left human and infrastructure carnage across the globe. We are throwing away everything we have, everything we think we value and more importantly – everything we need.
The US under Trump continues to throw away the economic stability clawed back by Obama during his 8 year tenure, its international credibility along with its global influence and it is literally throwing away the lives of desperate children and the ordinary workers of America – with the cuts to US AID and Medicaid.
Here in the UK – after the dreadfully hard-won and only briefly enjoyed gains secured for ordinary people after the sacrifices of WWII – the ‘throwing away’ begun with Thatcher, has not stopped.
Everything that was in public hands has been privatised. As a predictable and oft predicted result – services have plummeted in availability and quality and prices have sky-rocketed. The wealth gap in this country has widened exponentially and in poorer areas longevity has fallen for the first time since these things were monitored by The Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Wages have fallen in real time and – the same horror who gave us the illegal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq, with all its grotesque and ongoing consequences, introduced university tuition fees in a country where higher education had previously been free. So, having decimated an entire country on the other side of the world, Tony Blair can also take credit for economically crippling the lives of generations of young folk in his own bit of the globe.
And talking of Blair, the Bush/Blair fiasco in Iraq threw away the chance for stability in the Middle East. Its tempting, if you listen to the drone of Western legacy media, to imagine that, for example, ISIS sprang out of thin air rather than growing rapidly in the Petri dishes of the illegal invasion of Iraq and the disturbing events in Guantanamo Bay.
OF course now we have the genocide in Gaza, also facilitated by the UK/US.
We’ve been throwing away our planetary resources at an ever-increasing rate. Consumerism is out of control but the beast of late stage Capitalism needs to be fed. The more it feeds the more it hungers and the more we feed it. Chucking our resources down its dark deep endless maw until we’re cannibalising ourselves.
As humans, its often seemed to me that we are throwing away one of our most precious traits – empathy. Empathy, broadly speaking, is what makes us human. It developed with our ability to communicate, store information and accumulate knowledge and understanding. Empathy allows us to function as civilised beings. (Check out post 308 Get your face out of your phone.)
The unfettered invasion of technology and remote, robotic interactions in our lives seems to be driving empathy out. Now, regular readers of this blog may have an eye-roll. They may recall I am a Luddite. No smartphone – no social media. No TV since last century. No car, no microwave/dishwasher, no flying abroad for over 20 years. Etc. What does she know? Well, I still live in the world. A world where I am in an increasing minority (can minority increase?) A world where eye-contact seems rarer, children pointed in the direction of screens from babyhood struggle with language and concentration. I see it.
(Oh and the phenomenon of the childish tech-titan lunatic is beautifully dealt with also in Don’t Look Up.)
Is it this reduced empathy that allows us – in a world where we cannot not know how others suffer, to nevertheless ignore the traumas of our fellow human beings and carry on shopping, consuming, throwing away?
Our governments have increasingly thrown out the idea of regulation. That thing that protected ordinary people from the worst excesses of the Greed monster and the consumerism that is eating us. (check out blog post 383 Regulation is not a dirty word)
Recent examples of the devastating effects or the shunning by the rich and powerful of protective regulations are all around us but perhaps the best/worst example in recent living memory is the financial crash of 2008. In a nutshell – a catastrophic global financial failure brought about by rapacious avarice and the ability of the rich to pass the results of their failed risk taking down to those at the bottom of the economic food chain in secretive unregulated market practices.
Many parts of the world and many towns in the US where Wall St kicked off, for one example, the sub-prime nightmare, have not recovered to this day. Peoples futures were torn and thrown away as the Future’s markets grew fangs.
In fact, as the crash of 2008 is the main global economic trauma of my life-time, despite the ever available lessons of the 1929 Wall St crash and Great Depression, it feels as if even reality was thrown away.
Just consider that then Treasury Secretary Paulson in the Bush administration, gathered the heads of the richest US banks together and handed over a total $125bn as part of their self-induced-crisis bail-out while the victims – those who lost jobs and homes - got nothing. The final bill was $180bn and that is on top of the trillions those banks were borrowing from the Federal Reserve.
The top financial/social trauma this side of the pond recently was the 2016 self-harm of Brexit. Arguably as much to do with the desire of the wealthy for de-regulation as it was about rampant xenophobia. What throwing away our embedded and successful economic ties, educational, cultural, intelligence and research relationship to our closest block trading partner actually led to, was a massive hit to GDP and loss of global credibility. What we could show in return – even when we had the hideous splinter Jacob Rees-Mogg as Minister for Brexit Benefits - was a different coloured passport!
In 2016 we also seemed to throw out the notion that leaders should be even vaguely competent and at least apparently decent. That was when we got Trump I in America, Bolsonaro in Brazil and here in the UK, hopeless Theresa May who paved the way for the even more disastrous chancer Johnson.
Despite the film quoted in this piece and as we’ve just had the hottest year on record, its worth remembering, as per blog post 364, in reality Armageddon will not be televised.
But soon – very soon – there will not only be nothing left to throw away...