If you have been following us for any length of time, you have likely caught on that we here at Heavy Blog are an opinionated bunch. Yes, we obviously have many many feelings when it comes to all sorts of music-related topics, but unsurprisingly this also carries itself well over into the realms of other forms of art, media, culture, sports, and, yes, politics. Hence how we have wound up with this, The Void Screameth, where on the internet, nobody can hear you scream, but we can at least pound the keyboard until something legible comes out and hope that one or two other people read it!
Being “aware” of the apocalypse is meaningless
While I think there were many lessons that went unlearnt from the Trump presidency, in the US and out of it, one of the most frustrating ones is that being aware of something does absolutely nothing to solve or mitigate that thing. For the last three decades or so (and probably before that, but that’s how far my political memory goes), liberals and progressives have been telling us that it’s very important to “raise awareness”. You can see it in (overall good) campaigns like OXFAM, in the struggle for climate change, and in the fight against fascism. If only people knew, surely they would do something! This was most true with Trump: if only he’d release his tax receipts, if only people knew how he had lied, if only people knew what sort of monster he was, then he would be deposed.
But here’s the thing: most people are inherently good, it just doesn’t make one bit of difference. That’s a bitter pill to swallow but the only solution to the question of “if people are good then why isn’t the world better?” The other answer, that people are inherently evil, just doesn’t make sense and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny of the evidence (namely, how few people actually want to abuse another person, how few people actually think suffering is good, etc.) We’re left in a pickle then because the question remains. The answer, which leftists have been screaming out for at least two and a half centuries, if not more, is that the desires of people at large don’t make a difference without the material structures which enable change. You can want to end world hunger all you want but without very real, very material things (ranging from the “small”, like better roads in hunger stricken areas, to massive ones like the reorganization of the world economy) it just won’t happen.
Same thing goes for Trump or Nazis or COVID-19; you can focus all you want on making people recognize the facts but then imagining that this will somehow, magically, lead to a solution is naive to the extreme. Climate change is actually the best example: it can be argued that we (as in, people who think that climate change is happening and is important) have recently ended and won a big phase of the fight which was getting most people on the planet to agree that climate change is a thing. But, alas, now we find ourselves with the problem of “OK, what now?” and we just don’t have the infrastructure (material and ideological) to answer that question. We stand around screaming statistics and urging actions, creating ever more convincing infographics and explainer videos, while nothing is done and things get worse. Thing is, there is someone preparing the material solutions to climate change: capitalists. They’re already getting ready for the day after and to creating it in their image.
So, what’s my point? What should be done? Honestly, the answer to that question is so long that I won’t bother here but it can be boiled down to: anything. Literally do anything. Do something. Sharing articles, infographics, and such amounts to nothing. It achieves nothing. People know! They know the planet is warming, they know Trump is a sexual harasser, they know Nazis are bad. Those that don’t know those things are a waste of time; they are delusional. You will never convince them otherwise. So, it’s time to work around them. They will never be aware which, when you think about it, means “they will never limit themselves or change their ways”. So we must do it for them. And to do that, you need to go out into the world and organize. Raising awareness is not enough.
-Eden Kupermintz