Dwarfed

So New York City mayor Bloomberg decided to endorse Barack Obama for president, despite much disillusionment with the president’s performance, especially on economic issues. And New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was virtually gushing over the President’s response to Hurricane Sandy, despite the fact he had earlier endorsed Mitt Romney. At a time so close to the election this has been quite a reversal. How come?This is what Mother Nature does to anyone dwarfed by her might.  I’ve been in earthquakes in Europe, drought in Africa, monsoons in Bangladesh, and hurricanes in the United States. On each and every occasion the mighty human race was reduced to tears, fears, and a deep sense of mortality. It shakes even the most hardened individual to the soul. So, it makes perfect sense that the real attraction in all these political dynamics is not Obama but climate change. The president has put it largely on the back burner as he’s dealt with economic concerns, but thanks to Sandy he knows there is more to come and he’s summoning recruits to action like Bloomberg and Christie. If it weren’t for Sandy it’s doubtful action on climate change would have much place in the American election.This is what happens when governments and their people lose their capacity to concentrate on the vital things. The talk is all about complex policies, economic machinations, and partisan distraction. In such a condition we remain fixed in place, incapable of solving aboriginal injustice, high unemployment, declining infrastructure, the loss of the next generation from the public space, and, yes, climate change.In World War I, motorcycle dispatch riders, laden with vital communications between generals and their field officers, helped to unravel a mystery as to why there was continual delay in action, even though orders had been sent by dispatch hours earlier. The Americans and the British had taken to establishing their headquarters in the nicest chateaus in France, seconding them from their rightful owners. The problem was that such opulent dwellings had been purposefully built in exclusion. Dispatch riders reported getting consistently lost because there were no clear directions to such exotic headquarters. The French, on the other hand, placed their headquarters in train stations, telegraph offices and post offices in town centres – easy to find, accessible public places from which orders could be easily issued.In so many ways this is what governments have done with policies. They are no longer pedestrian, often targeted at elite or signature programs, and removed from average people and communities for whom they once were designed. Action on the most needed files is often postponed indefinitely while governments pursue their own pet projects that have little to do with the critical mass of Canadians. This is what inevitably occurred when it came to taking action on climate change: policies were considered, even dispatched, but never reached their targeted outcomes. Even the media focused on the chateaus and not on the realities of governmental neglect.But thanks to Sandy, everyone is now talking climate change. While some still wish to argue whether it is caused by humans or not, America and Canada have come to see once again that significant change is coming, and likely fast. In North America, the number of weather-related disasters has quintupled over the last three decades. That’s just plain reality, evidenced based, regardless of how people argue the cause. Some say that you still can’t prove the Sandy was due to man-made activity. Such debates are important, but for a period of a few days, Americans, including many of their top elected officials, had to confront the reality that for policymakers and politicians the reality of climate change has massive implications.The reality is that Romney, Obama, Christie and Bloomberg are embarrassed. They now realize that it was a massive oversight to keep climate change out of the election debates. It didn’t seem to matter prior to Sandy; now these individuals are calling for emergency actions, both now and for the future. These were politicians caught unprepared for what was about to befall their country. This is the politics of our age: unprepared, remote, insensitive, unaware, and above all isolated from the real threats and needs of people. They planted their policies in places out of reach of either reality or citizens.It is now universally acknowledged that more super-storms, increased drought, record flooding, and massively expensive weather-related disasters will become the new normal. Sadly, politicians and citizens alike have heard these warnings for a decade. We have watched in fascination as farms are blown away by dust, city streets are filled with flooding currents, or hurricanes destroy average people’s lives in a few terrifying seconds. It was great theatre that, sadly, never became sound policy.The contemporary politician no longer has perspective. Everything is in the foreground and appears the same size. In skewed fashion little matters (partisanship, fanning the base, fundraising) loom large and great matters (climate change, growing poverty, city decline) are often overlooked because their outline can't be seen. No wonder long-term effective policies are in such short supply.The time has come for a new democratic revolution, one based on practical policy instead of partisan pranks. Such a change will likely start with hashtag instead of party reform, but start it must. The time has come for climate policy to hit the mainstream. Hurricane Sandy have provided us just one more opportunity to examine our obstinacy. Time to flush us out of our chateaus and back to where people actually live.