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 196 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
There’s no business like show business
This week: Another Lesson from Theatre
There are rules
In theatre, the rules are agreed-upon conventions that make the whole effort of communal storytelling possible. Theatre is a human endeavor, by and for humans, about what it means to be a human living at this time, and the rules operate as guideposts that allow us to both listen and react in meaningful ways to the stories being told.
Theatre’s rules reflect how humans understand the world
In comedies, people make fools of themselves but learn the lessons they need to learn to right the world. In tragedies, people act like fools and don’t learn the lessons, or only learn them when it’s too late. Tragedy ends in death, comedy ends in the re-establishment of social order, often via marriage.
In farce, the mechanistic stepchild of comedy, characters desperately navigate an increasingly Rube Goldberg-esque set of circumstances caused mostly by themselves. They enact more and more outlandish strategies to keep going in their desperate bids for survival, usually battling the set as well as each other. Unlike in other types of comedy, the characters in a farce do not change or grow during the course of a play. Their goal is just survival, they see no farther ahead than the next second, and they get to the end of the story, battered and bruised, without having learned a thing. Their achievement — survival — is not guaranteed to last longer than the end of the play. They are ridiculous, and do an enormous amount to achieve essentially nothing.
So what kind of play are you in?
What kind of story are you telling the people of SF? By your statements, you seem to think you’re in a comedy and that everything’s going to be okay at the end once someone else learns their lesson.
Your actions and reactions have put you firmly in farce territory. Remember, acting is action, and your actions are increasingly out of touch with reality. Viewed from the audience, your work looks like endless spinning around with no balance, lots of yelling with no listening, and enormous amounts of casting blame with no change to the physical situation that keeps getting worse and worse. These are the hallmarks of classic farce. Add in lots of slamming doors, which you have, and no one changing, which you also have, and it’s clear you’re performing farce.
Too bad that’s not the actual story that’s being told. See, your stage is much bigger than you realize, and its mechanisms are much less forgiving than you expect them to be. You’re doing a farce in a little corner of the space, pretending that what you’re doing is all that is. But, instead of a comedy or a farce, you’re really in a tragedy. Let’s be clearer, you’re actually causing a tragedy. This is often the case in tragedy where hubris leads to disaster. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the bodies littering the stage at the end of this show won’t only be from the main characters. Like with the original Greek tragedies, the entire city is suffering and is going to suffer much more because of your choices.
You don’t understand the rules controlling your stage
The stage you’re acting your little farce on is ruled by physics, not human conventions. Begging, threatening, scolding, taunting, scaring, seducing, bribing, bargaining, flirting, corrupting, understanding, complicating, imagining, compromising, crying, feeling, yelling, running, and all the other possible strategies used to achieve human objectives don’t work on physics. But you keep acting as if they will.
So you keep yelling at each other and running around, slamming doors, and the situation keeps getting worse and worse.
What’s the definition of insanity?
“Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.” This quote, by the way, isn’t from Einstein but from Narcotics Anonymous (1981).
What can you do to change the narrative?
Learn the rules — both the rules of physics and of theatre — and get real.
The rules of theatre
- You aren’t what you say but what you do.
- Talk is not action.
- Action makes the story
- There are no small parts; actors who think they have small parts aren’t paying attention.
The rules of physics
- Inertia. F = ma. For every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction.
- Gravity. Speed of light. Electricity. Bonding.
- Conservation of energy. Thermal equilibrium. Energy can be transferred between systems as heat, work, or matter. Entropy.
- The Gas Laws (Boyle’s, Charles’s, Gay-Lussac’s, Avogadro’s, Graham’s, Dalton’s, Henry’s, and the Van der Waals equation of state change to the Ideal Gas Law).
- Density.
What do these rules tell you about how to act?
- You have to act. [theatre #1, 2, and 3]
- Your actions at the city and county level can make a difference. [theatre #4]
- There is no time to waste. [physics #1, 2]
- Small actions will no longer produce significant results. [physics #1, 2, 3, 4]
- The rates of environmental change are accelerating, and we have passed and are fast approaching multiple tipping points. [physics #1, 3, 4, 5]
- The consequences of not acting or acting too minimally are destructive beyond anything our species has ever experienced. [physics #1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
It’s still not too late to act
We’ve already destroyed the planet we were born on. It’d be better not to let this one die, too. All you have to do is act.