In our family, we always laugh about the long list of side effects pharmaceutical ads will place at the end of an ad showing slo-mo joyous health and happiness supposedly provided by the suggested cure. Often “risk of death” is listed as a side effect.

And yet, many of us take those medications with risks of extreme side effects.

Under capitalism, certainly, there have always been jobs one of whose side effects was death, and there have always been people willing to do them–forced to do them–in order to support themselves and their families. We’ve set this up for hundreds of years, the risk of death as a condition of survival. How can we suddenly expect people to shift this mindset with no social support, to ask them to prioritize social health over their own survival? But what instead if we could radically shift this ratio of risk-of-death to effort-to-survive, not only in the face of a pandemic but in the brutal business-first capitalism of the right? What if we plan ahead for the consequences of the actions we’re going to need for the kind of life- and planet-saving policies on which our future depends?

It would have been great to get ahead of this pandemic. Our government had the chance and turned it down. If only they had acted in December. In January. In February. Let us learn from this grave mistake. We are facing another threat that is even more grave. When it comes to the climate crisis, we should have acted decades ago. Five years ago. Last year. In the conditions set for the bailout of the airlines last month.  Where I live–in California–we acted on crucial scientific information about Coronavirus by sheltering in place starting in mid-March. Those early-for-the-U.S. actions made a difference. When it comes to climate crisis, we have the opportunity, right now, with this election and with our political actions to begin to put into place the measures that will allow all of us (or more of us) to survive the global consequences both of the necessary actions to stop climate catastrophe and the consequences of our having thus far failed to do so. 

We all understand now, I think, that individual recycling is not enough, individual canceling of flights, individual driving of electric cars, eating vegetarian, etc. will not in itself be enough to swing the planet away from total climate catastrophe. Now, more than ever, it is also plain to see that the radical systemic actions required are going to impact human beings right away, and some more than others. A one-time $1200 check isn’t going to cut it.

I want all of us who are not in danger of going hungry right now or losing our housing/ any housing to think again about the choices we’d make if that were the case. If our sheltering in place put at immediate risk our lives and those of our children, parents, loved ones. If the collective actions we must take now to shift the direction we’re headed environmentally do, indeed, threaten our lifestyles and, for many, our lives. We cannot ask people to act to save lives–their own, their loved ones, neighbors and also strangers–if they are simultaneously risking or flat-out losing their livelihoods, that by which they keep themselves and their loved ones (and incidentally, their neighbors and strangers) alive. We have to counter those consequences, systemically, right now and going forward as we implement the kinds of enormous structural changes that will turn us away from fossil fuels. In order to act now on the climate crisis, we have to reject the false dichotomy between taking life-saving scientific action and surviving day to day. And if you’re wishing we had a template for that, we do: the Green New Deal. Let’s vote, act, speak out, and support everything that moves us, fast, in that direction now.