Prosperity

My friend Christy published an article called The Ban on Hot Takes earlier this year that I think of often, especially when I can feel myself having a hot take that wants to jump out of my body into the messy hot take mud pit with everybody’s else’s. It gives me pause and makes me careful with my words, and I appreciate that a lot.

Today in Everything Is Related Always And No There Are No Exceptions, I would like to share a brief note about who and what we center when we think about climate, progress, the future, justice, and other issues that bop around in my (and your?) head all day.

The thesis statement is: The only way that anything, and I really mean anything, will ever be truly sustainably improved, is when we center the safety and dignity of the absolute most marginalized person or entity.

And I have to say this because a lot of people think that climate-adapting East Hampton is more important than climate reparations being sent to Pakistan or Nigeria, or any of the countless other regions suffering from the effects of hundreds of years of pillaging the vulnerable (people and land included), because what people tend to care about is themselves and their immediate surroundings and issues. Even if we look closer to home, let’s say domestically, a fair amount more attention, support, and reparations could go to the people of Jackson, Mississippi, who still do not have the guarantee that their drinking water is safe due to a particularly potent combo of climate neglect and racist, classist mismanaged legislation.

When we look at the recent stripping of federally protected abortion rights, the battleground of that argument is rife with morality politics about who deserves access to an abortion, centered on fault or intention or innocence, and ignoring the fact that everyone who has the ability to conceive a child should have access to abortion, regardless of their morality or righteousness in the eyes of the public.

And hyper-locally, when we consider the crippling issue of New York City’s unhoused population, the defense of real estate developers or landlords looking for top dollar of the perceived value of their homes is being placed above the safety and management of people who have little to no choices, little to no mobility, little to no power.

These are all issues of sustainability because they are all issues of life and its ability to sustain itself prosperously on this planet.

And the definition of the word ‘prosperously’, rather than meaning richly, decadently, and exceedingly so, could in this instance mean all human prospering in safety, in the breathing of clean air, in access to nutritious food, in harmony and in concert with the planet. Your individual register for prosperity may include living on a superyacht in the Mediterranean, but global human prosperity means no one develops unnecessary illnesses or death due to chemicals in food, or lack of access to fresh air or water, or lack of shelter.

But in order to do that for everyone, we would need to prioritize the prosperity of the absolute most marginalized. Why don’t we do this? What are we so afraid of having taken away from us by creating rules, guidelines, pathways for everyone to have equal access to life? What if we did not wait for threatening conditions to cross the boundary line into our own comfort zone, but we instead defended the dignity and equality of those whose boundaries have already been violated?

There are more analogies for this that I could bring in, but Christy told me not to be a Hot Take Monster. But I really want us all to ask ourselves - what are we under the impression we would lose by lifting up the conditions for those who are living, directly or indirectly, in the oppression of the lifestyles of those with more privilege?