Black-and-white world
Jan. 9th, 2007 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
openspace4lifeWe liberals tend to cringe reflexively at statements like "If you're not with us, then you're against us." But environmental and social activists have a similar catch phrase: "If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem."
True, at first glance the phrase "part of the problem" seems less harsh than accusing anyone who doesn't fully support America's present policies of being some kind of enemy combatant. But when the problem we're referring to is the imminent collapse of the global biosphere under the weight of industrial civilization, which will lead to massive human suffering and death, well, the scales could be said to tip the other way. Simply because I don't have my own solar array or an organic farm, so that I'm forced to use electricity from a coal-fired power plant and buy plastic-packaged food from major corporations, does that make me an enemy of humankind and planet Earth?
The truth, of course, is that any individual can contribute to both the problems and the solutions in varying degrees. But then that doesn't make much of a slogan, does it?
True, at first glance the phrase "part of the problem" seems less harsh than accusing anyone who doesn't fully support America's present policies of being some kind of enemy combatant. But when the problem we're referring to is the imminent collapse of the global biosphere under the weight of industrial civilization, which will lead to massive human suffering and death, well, the scales could be said to tip the other way. Simply because I don't have my own solar array or an organic farm, so that I'm forced to use electricity from a coal-fired power plant and buy plastic-packaged food from major corporations, does that make me an enemy of humankind and planet Earth?
The truth, of course, is that any individual can contribute to both the problems and the solutions in varying degrees. But then that doesn't make much of a slogan, does it?
