Not all opinions are equal

I have always wanted to be for peace.

The peacemakers of today’s well-connected world cry, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion! Just scroll on past!”

And I find that I cannot be a peacemaker because all opinions are not created equal.

There are opinions about whether this or that candidate is better. There are opinions about how we should manage the city water problem. There are opinions about which health care or tax policy is best. And generally those opinions are all equal. I may disagree with one or more, but I am happy to listen and let live.

It’s when an opinion is hate against a person or group of people due to circumstances beyond their control that it is no longer an opinion, or at least no longer equal.

Many pundits blame social media for the angry divides of today’s society. And I can see why. Social media is where a lot of arguments happen.

But social media is designed to send us what we like. The algorithms of the various sites don’t send us everything available but rather place us in bubbles of mostly those who agree with us. We only encounter a fraction of the differing opinions out there.

Social media doesn’t set out to create conflict. Quite the opposite. But technology has become a great leveler.

I think it is more that relatively cheap and portable technology has given voices to everyone and blurred lines of geography. It makes the saying, “Injustice somewhere is injustice everywhere,” more palpable.

The fact is that the world was NOT less divided thirty years ago or a hundred years ago. It was more divided.

But privileged people didn’t know about most of it and those experiencing the most injustice had only each other to talk to about their exploitation. The world was more segregated and groups deemed unsightly either stayed out of sight or were put out of sight.

Today the world is not any more divided than it was, but we know about more divides than we used to. Opinions and the actions they engendered which harmed less privileged groups were not often challenged because the harmed groups had no voice and no access to the places where the privileged relaxed and talked.

Now that social media is that place and technology has allowed almost everyone in, we are confronted by those we have opinions about. And they talk back..

I grew up in remote, rural Eastern Oregon, an area that voted 70 percent for Trump in 2016 and which was almost entirely white when I was a child.

When my mom first arrived in the area to homestead with my father, she saw a black family at a gas station in the tiny town of Elgin. She went up to them gladly. Black people had taken her in when she had to leave home at seventeen and she was overjoyed to see their faces. But the father told her they were leaving because of the rampant racism and ostracism in the area.

They left and that was that. No more “divide” in the community.

When I heard racist jokes at school as a child, I didn’t call them out the way I do on Facebook. I kept my head down because as a kid with a disability, I got plenty of bullying as it was. It wasn’t a “divide” because I had no voice, no possibility of standing up, and People of Color were simply elsewhere.

Now we see a divide. Before we could pretend it didn’t exist because those who were vulnerable hid it to survive or were so far removed from us that we never saw or heard from them.

Opening up, people who were shut away walking out in public, the formerly silenced having a voice—these things are not divisive. It is not the “evil” of social media that creates the strife.

It is bigotry and judgementalism. It has always been there. Now it is being challenged.

I welcome differences of opinion when they are not about judging and mistreating others. It is really that simple. Not all opinions are equal. You are entitled to your opinion so long as it does not incite hatred or judgment against others for characteristics they did not choose… or even for things they did choose in so far as they have no bearing on anyone beyond themselves.

Ridiculing a person with a disability, accusing them of “faking” or declaring what you think they should not be allowed to do or have responsibility for is not an “opinion.” It’s an attack for the purpose of silencing and dismissing people.

I am fine with discussing health care policy and climate policy and immigration control and medical ethics with varied viewpoints. What is not open for discussion and what will get comments deleted without warning are those opinions which specifically judge and attack people for reasons that are innate to them.

People standing up to judgement, on the other hand, are welcome. Our voices only sound strident or hot-tempered because they are rusty from too much silence.

Fair warning.

Considering the uses of a border wall

My brain is a trouble-maker. I swear it isn’t really me. Just my brain.

Every other time I write something online it brings out the attack dogs. I try to tell my brain to cool it. But my brain is like, “Look at this! Just take a look at the facts!”

• As early as the 1970s, Exxon (now ExxonMobil), the world’s largest oil company, had convincing evidence of the threat of climate change connected to the burning of fossil fuels. For decades they responded by funding misinformation campaigns in an effort to conceal the evidence, but their own scientists were well aware of the truth. The wealthy individuals and corporations, who now fund the campaigns of the most powerful policy makers and also fund climate change denial spin, have all the data. They know that they are lying.

• The most widely supported current models for climate change predict that even with the international goal of limiting climate change to a 2°C global temperature rise much of Central America, the Middle East and North Africa could become uninhabitable or at least unfarmable. These regions. which already experience significant drought, will likely have so little water by 2050 that widespread and extreme famine is probable. (I know it happens to be cold right now for many of us, but in Australia the daytime temperature is melting car tires. The small global temperature rise is just an indicator scientists use to talk about a much more complex change. It’s the extreme drought in farm country that will probably end up troubling you.)

• Border walls are the new “in” thing internationally. All over the world countries have gone from high-tech border security solutions to the medieval wall tactic. At the end of WWII, there were only seven border walls or fences around the world. Today there are seventy-seven. Several of them have been erected specifically because of climate migration, such as the massive 1,700 mile barbed wire fence between relatively prosperous India and low-lying Bangladesh, which is densely populated and loses more of its land area to flooding from rising oceans each year.

• Europe has already witnessed crowds of desperate, climate refugees massing at border barricades and being forced back .

• Trump’s campaign promise of a border wall—together with the supposition that Mexico would pay for it—was so cartoonish that even his supporters didn’t seem to entirely believe him. Trump supporters at the time were often on TV saying, “I don’t care if Mexico really pays it, but I love that he says it.” But now Trump has made significant political and economic sacrifice in an attempt to force the construction and US-tax-payer financing of his border wall.

• Illegal crossings over the southern US border are at an all-time low. Most “illegal migration” in the US today involves people arriving by air and overstaying their vises. And rising illegal migration from Asia is currently a bigger issue than that from Central America. It is more than strange that Trump is insisting on this wall now. Analysts pass it off as crowd-pleasing for his anti-immigrant base. But the political and economic costs of the lengthy government shutdown go beyond crowd pleasing and seem likely to sour even Trump’s supporters.

© Tomas Castelazo www.tomascastelazo.com Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0

Too complicated? OK, boil that down:

1. The border wall isn’t needed for real security now.

2. Trump is making significant sacrifices to get a border wall.

3. Elites all over the world are building border walls, particularly against areas hit by climate disasters.

4. Climate change analysis warns that Central America could become uninhabitable through drought and famine within decades.

5. Trump and his primary supporters in the fossil fuel industry have had access to evidence of this very climate change longer than anyone else.

“So….” my brain winks suggestively.

OK, I’ll say it, though it will no doubt bring the attack dogs out yet again.

I think it is possible that Trump is well aware that the border wall will not help with current security, but his vehement insistence and significant sacrifices to ensure that it is built actually are rooted in rational—if cold-blooded—reasoning.

If climate change creates massive, unending drought in Central America there will not just be caravans of refugees or migrant workers. There will be waves of starving people.

Creative Commons image by Thomas & Dianne Jones

Millions of starving people.

We have seen a military-style response on the border with tear-gas being fired at refugees. I fear that we are being prepared for a new normal, in which we will be outraged, but in the end, helpless to stop a full military defense at a border wall with deadly ammunition in a situation in which food and most particularly water have become significantly more scarce commodities.

Do I have proof?

Not more than the facts piling up. I don’t have a memo from fossil fuel execs to Trump directing him to stick to his guns on the border wall or we’ll be invaded by millions of starving climate refugees, which by sheer numbers would probably spark actual economic hardship rather than the economic boost that current immigration brings to the country.

No, but the general public has just about everything short of that.

Am I just being alarmist and depressing?

I know that things like this tend to demotivate and depress people, as in, “The future is bleak. Let’s go drink and binge watch Netflix.”

Nope. Not helpful.

What is helpful is recognizing the deeper reasons behind policies and addressing root causes. Until now, we may not have considered immigration reform advocates and climate activists to be close allies, but we should be. Not only would the physical wall itself harm delicate desert ecosystems and perpetuate inhumane foreign and immigration policies, it is also very possibly a crutch to allow the fossil fuel industry and their bought policy makers to continue to ignore the immanent threat of climate change.

Just saying.