5 Reasons Choosing Compassion is a Radical Political Act

Nature’s pretty damned up in our faces right now, kicking our butts. Our current state of isolation, anxiety, fear, loss, and ongoing uncertainty can be pretty damned depressing.

But the pandemic, awful as it is, isn’t even our biggest problem. We humans are in real trouble. The planet is on its way to a no-longer-slow boil that threatens to kill not only the frogs, but the rest of us, too. Unless we take radical and immediate action, the future of our species, seems increasingly precarious. The science is clear (and has been for decades). The alarms are ear-splitting for anyone willing to hear them.

The planet will survive, but we may well not. Neither may billions of creatures of earth who certainly don’t deserve mass slaughter.

As my German father-in-law used to say, we are the skin cancer of the planet. We are consuming the host that sustains us.

The question is not whether we need to take action. We do — massive action. The question is more what actions we could take now that would be radical enough to mitigate the looming crisis. When a skeptical student asked me recently how much the Green New Deal would cost, I asked him whether he understood how much it will cost us if we do nothing. The Green New Deal is actually just the start.

Of course, I’m only one person. What can I do?

I used to believe, or at least fear, that cynicism was a truer view of the world. I feared that life was…