(Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Corner - Photo Illustration - MetroCreativeConnection)

“To the American who is more than satisfied with himself and his country this volume is affectionately dedicated.”

So reads the opening dedication to J.A. Mitchell’s 1889 novel “The Last American.” An early example of post-apocalyptic literature, this brief tale describes a crew of explorers in the year 2951, who happen upon the ancient ruins of a devastated America. Of particular note is how the book describes the downfall of our once powerful nation:

“Climatic changes, the like of which no other land ever experienced, began at that period, and finished in less than ten years a work made easy by nervous natures and rapid lives. The temperature would skip in a single day from burning heat to winter’s cold. No constitution could withstand it, and this vast continent became once more an empty wilderness.”

Bear in mind that this prophecy came at a time when climate science was still in its infancy, with Svante Arrhenius, a relative of Greta Thunberg, only describing industrial civilization’s contribution to the greenhouse effect seven years following the book’s publication.

Nor is the book especially charitable to the self-destructive architects of the nation’s undoing, describing Americans as a “shallow, nervous, extravagant people,” as well as ​​a “sharp, restless, quick-witted, greedy race, given body and soul to the gathering of riches. Their chiefest passion was to buy and sell.”

I must sorrowfully admit that I’ve come to share this perspective over the past several years. My personal political awakening, for all intents and purposes, largely began with the political rise of Donald Trump one long, miserable decade ago around 2015.

It was as clear then as it is today that Trump was a cold-blooded fascist who had zero place anywhere in America’s halls of power. It horrified me to see his naked racism, rampant abuse of women, and insatiable thirst for violence so warmly embraced by so much of the general populace.

“This is not normal,” I kept telling myself as I watched this brazen demagogue ascend to power. Eventually, though, I came to the awful realization that I was mistaken – that rather than some anomaly, Trumpism is the inevitable culmination of every worst impulse displayed by our society. Furthermore, I realized that many of those professing to be horrified by Trump’s actions were, instead, merely opposed to his lack of decorum, and were only too happy to overlook policies and actions that were indistinguishable from Trump’s own when carried out by their preferred candidates or members of their own party, so long as it was being done in a more “decent” and presentable fashion.

My coming of age as a climate activist has followed a largely similar course. My initial response to the catastrophic heating of our planet was to (correctly) assign blame to rightwing extremists and climate deniers for deliberately hindering efforts to combat the problem. And yet again, the further I delved into the issue, the more I came to realize that the looming climate apocalypse was a wholly bipartisan affair.

The acolytes of neoliberalism who at least give lip service to the crisis at hand offer little more than wholly inadequate, piecemeal solutions as a means of greenwashing what is, in reality, a colossal and systemic catastrophe. Insofar as they may appear polar opposites, the average climate-denying Republican and “trust the science” Democrat share common priorities of individual material comfort, Western global hegemony, and preservation of the status quo above all other concerns.

Finally I arrive at the ongoing holocaust being carried out in Gaza. Never in my life did I anticipate witnessing the American-backed horrors that have haunted my every waking thought for the past two years — or at least, not until the global collapse of the biosphere inevitably makes such atrocities an everyday occurrence.

As author Antony Loewenstein writes in his excellent book “The Palestine Laboratory:”

“Israel’s Palestine Laboratory thrives on global disruption and violence. The worsening climate crisis will benefit Israel’s defense sector in a future where nation states do not respond with active measures to reduce the impacts of surging temperatures, but instead ghetto-ize themselves Israel style. What this means in practice is higher walls and tighter borders, greater surveillance of refugees, facial recognition, drones, smart fences, and biometric databases.”

Ecological economics professor and IPCC Assessment Report author Julia Steinberger warned similarly back in October 2023: “Gaza is a blueprint for all of us this century. This is what the first real signal of this new century looks like, out in the open, clear for all to see.”

There’s a common thread of imperialist racism and violent capitalist gluttony that pervades these issues, but there are two unique features that stand out to me above all else.

First there’s the complete lack of guardrails, the total absence of a safety net in place to prevent the unthinkable. The complete fascist takeover of America should be wholly inconceivable to us, as should the reality of so thoroughly polluting the planet that much of it becomes uninhabitable. It should not be possible, in the 21st Century, that 2 million people should face the prospect of total annihilation at the genocidal hands of a settler colonialist state. Time and again we find ourselves desperately looking to the mechanisms we’re meant to believe will protect us, be it international law or the U.S. Constitution, only to realize we’ve been entirely abandoned to our own devices.

What stands out secondly is our society’s total unwillingness to engage in what should be a natural response to these realities. America’s ubiquitous apathy, the complete indifference we show to the eradication of human life in our names, and perhaps even the total collapse of our own society, simply boggles the imagination.

As the Twitter user UMO once memorably wrote, “Americans are the least rebellious people on earth who also like to congratulate themselves on being rebellious more than anyone. “I’m a renegade! My favorite people are the cops and my boss!””

Indeed, at a time when our need for resistance to these systems of mass death and oppression is at its greatest, what passes for “rebels” in our society are bigots rolling coal in their oversized pickup trucks, proudly waving Confederate flags beneath a smog-filled sky. This brand of “rebelliousness” being sold to us is nothing more than a sad Halloween costume, while the dominant cultural attitude remains one of apathy and subservience to a system that is quite literally burning our planet to the ground, murdering us and our children with our full and informed consent.

In its closing pages, set fittingly within the centuries-old ruins of the U.S. Capitol Building, “The Last American” notes that “it would be impossible to imagine a more pathetic mixture of glory and decay, of wealth and poverty, of civilization and barbarity.”

With every day that passes in the dying U.S. empire, Miller’s century old novel comes to seem less and less like some outlandish science fiction satire, and increasingly like a faithful portrait of the grim but wholly preventable fate to which we’ve so pitifully resigned ourselves.

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Aaron Dunbar is a member of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.