You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 161 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
The most generous explanation for you not acting for SF is:
This week’s topic: Learned helplessness and DARVO
Let’s start with definitions
Learned helplessness develops when people feel they have no control over their situation. Learned helplessness leads to low self-esteem, frustration, passivity, lack of effort, and giving up.
DARVO — “deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender” — describes common manipulation tactics of psychological abusers. Denial typically involves gaslighting, the attack stage can include threats of lawsuits as well as ridicule and attacks on the accuser’s credibility, and the goal of reversal is to put the offender on offense to force the victim to play defense.
DARVO can produce learned helplessness
When you cannot predict what behaviors cause dangerous outcomes, you limit your behaviors. If every decision results in misery, you give over all decision-making entirely.
How does this relate to SF and climate change?
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. CO2 is increasing ocean height, global temperatures, and extreme weather events, it is deepening the megadrought, and it is growing in amount in the atmosphere at an accelerating pace. Transportation creates 41% of all CA’s CO2 output. Cars are the primary transportation emitter in SF. Clearly, then, cars are dangerous to SF’s continued health.
Yet any action to reduce car access to any locale in SF produces screaming from a small but loud contingent in San Francisco. This screaming is very directed at policymakers, is very heavily from the privileged, and results in policymakers watering down, delaying, and walking back even small changes to car access.
For example, some car owners are yelling that limiting car access is worse than allowing cars to continue to go wherever they want. This is denial/ gaslighting — and a major argument they’ve used about the Great Highway, JFK Drive, and Slow Streets. These same people attack those of us who want to limit cars. These attacks are sometimes physical in addition to frequent verbal assaults on the streets when biking or walking, as well as in community meetings and venues. And they claim reducing car access makes them victims by insisting that change endangers them while ignoring the real, documented dangers that are reduced or eliminated by reduced car traffic, such as pedestrian and cyclist deaths and injuries.
And that’s just one small example.
You’ve learned that your “best” action is not to act
The actions you do take are small and only make small changes in the lives of small, not well-organized parts of the public. New government buildings can’t have gas infrastructure? The buildings don’t exist yet and government is the purchasing entity so it’s not a huge problem. But go after gas in restaurants and suddenly there’s screaming and suddenly you back off.
You act as if you’re playing Operation when the reality is we’re mid-game in Pandemic and starting out on The Climate Trail.1
Learned helplessness is a bad way to govern
That’s the excuse used over and over again by Republicans for not putting any kind of controls on gun ownership. That was the excuse they gave for not ever crossing Trump. That was the excuse Democrats gave for not eliminating the filibuster. That’s the excuse everyone uses for not standing up to police unions.
DARVO has no legitimate place in politics
It is the tactic of bullies. It only causes harm. It can be expressed as “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” a guiding principle that has led to rule by the rich elites and the rape of the planet.
How do you unlearn learned helplessness?
Believe you can act and accomplish things. Look clearly and factually at the consequences of your non-actions vs. your actions. And goal-set using the SMART method wherein your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. For example, with Vision Zero you’re missing out on timely because you weren’t specific on how to measurably get to zero deaths by 2024.
So now will you please, at last, ACT?
Time is so so so short. Survival is getting harder and harder to achieve. Act.
FOOTNOTES
1. https://www.theclimatetrail.com.