We Live in a Shriveled, Angry Frightening World

Our world is getting smaller, more restrictive, poorer, less hopeful, more polluted and less livable. Something that Palestinian film director Elia Suleiman said in a France 24 interview on the occasion of the release of his newest film “It Must Be Heaven”, resonated deeply for me: “the world today has become a global Palestine.” In that short sentence the film director who always plays an ever-silent character in his ground breaking movies, picked up on a universal theme and trend that defines the modern human condition: hopelessness. 

The majority of humans today are mired in deep unending unresolvable poverty that limits their movement both social and physical, geopolitical realities confine us all to our own particular corner of the third world, each group struggling to survive day to day, to feed ourselves from lands that are getting less and less fertile, waiting for rains that do not come, isolated from each other through sectarian or ethnic or political divisions that are more pronounced than they ever were before in what we refer to as the modern era.

To describe the world in such terms seems to some to be needlessly morbid and extreme, but the majority of those who object to such a description are the very few in the Europeanized and wealthy parts of the globe for whom wealth concentration at the top has been of great benefit. They are less than the one percent of human beings on this earth.  For the overwhelming majority of humans, the world is no longer a limitless source or wealth and bounty for those willing to venture out in to it. We have reached our world’s limits in the very real environmental sense and we seem to have reached the limits of human tolerance and acceptance and generosity as well. Ours is a bleak world indeed.

It is at this time of year, Christmas time, that I remember my late father with more than a tinge of sadness. I know death is part of life and loss is an inevitable part of living, that is not the reason for my sadness, the reason for my sadness is the passing of my father’s world and the dawning of this new alien place I do not recognize. I am sad at how our world has shrunk and shriveled up in the last 20 years. In the 1990s, we thought that making our planet one big happy global village would bring prosperity and happiness to all. It was a hopeful time. But this has not come to pass. If anything, borders are closing rather than opening, tariffs and barriers to trade and rising and increasing rather than falling altogether. The environment today is more under threat than at any other time, mainly from the tribe of anti-science warriors flooding social media with comforting egotistical idiotic lies. The global warming deniers, the clean coal advocates, and a US President who will make deals even with the devil himself if he incorporates and plays ball with a conservative agenda, all these are reasons to be sad today. Justice is now a dream found only in books of fiction and children’s fairytales.

My father’s world, and your fathers’ world too, was greater, bigger, more promising and more hopeful. If my father was alive today, he wouldn’t recognize the world we live, this post information revolution world devoid of any shred of hope.

In my own country, too, I see this ‘global Palestine’ in the everyday struggle to buy essentials, to heat our homes, to withdraw cash, to get to work and then home again on the same day, here too we are people devoid of hope who try and smile and tell lies to ourselves, to each other and to our children in the slim hope that their emergent world may be a better one.

Even in the closing chapters of yesterday’s euphoric limitless world, there were signs of bad things to come. The famines that struck parts of Africa in the 80s and for which the Europeanized world launched multiple relief campaigns, were an indication of the trouble ahead for us in the state of the environment and our future inability to grow enough food to feed ourselves as a human species.

In US politics as well, the signs of worse things to come were clear for all who wanted to see, as when US Republican Senator Barry Goldwater wrote in 1994 about the Religious Right rising to a leadership position in his own party: “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.” 

Today, we see this come to pass in the uncompromising pro-Zionist /Neo-Con, Alt Christian Right foreign policy of the Trump administration, which violates international law, a policy that has declared the unconditional surrender of the Arabs in the Arab/Israeli struggle, alienated Palestinians by giving away their lands and reduced a once vaunted peace process and road map to peace in the Middle East to wreckage. This foreign policy has surrendered the moral high ground to a regime like that in Iran, a repressive theocracy that was once the best argument for continued US presence in the region. Now, Iran is considered by many an ally of moderate Arabs in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria and even further afield. This foreign policy has allowed Russia’s sphere of influence to expand into the Middle East and for Russia to position itself as the region’s savior from US extremism. This US foreign policy has made us all, this whole region, less safe.

My father’s world, the post WWII world, saw a different America, a truly great and generous America that ignited the largest global economic boom this planet had seen up to that point. American products, American movies, American cars and culture were all available at a reasonable price and it was a time of plenty. That world is dead now and many busy themselves today trying to guess what world will emerge out of the wreckage. I think it’s too early to say, we are still in the heart of the storm, a storm that will leave us all depleted and impoverished, what comes next seems so far away and irrelevant to our present struggle that I try not to think on it too much.