In this latest article, George Monbiot tells us that “Hope is the rope from which we all hang.”
Twenty years ago, he says we thought the world’s environmental problems could be solved by now. Instead, “the past 20 years have been a billionaires’ banquet”, “governments have removed the constraining decencies – the laws and regulations – which prevent one person from destroying another”, and the US is now insisting that word’s like “equitable must be cleansed from the text [of the summit, along with] any mention of the right to food, water, health, the rule of law, gender equality and women’s empowerment.”
We live in a plutocracy, Monbiot argues, where those with money see themselves as able to consume as they wish, forcing even Obama to backtrack on the commitments made by George Bush senior. “Political systems that were supposed to represent everyone now return governments of millionaires, financed by and acting on behalf of billionaires.”
It is difficult to disagree.
Ond only a mass social movement, Monbiot says, can counter this trend. And that movement is nowhere to be seen. Hope is the rope from which we all hang.
But if hope is gone then we have nothing to lose.
I am only one person. I cannot do everything. But I can still do the one thing that I can do.
Oregon or bust. Dunkirk spirit. The Spartan 300. When people’s backs are against the wall they do extraordinary things.
Hope is the rope by which we pull ourselves free.