The Age of Inaction

Explain Now to the Future Like I’m Five 

“So how old were you when people figured out they had really messed up the climate?”

“Young--I mean, I can’t even remember people NOT talking about it, although it took a while before it was widely discussed.”

“Discussed, yeah, but why didn’t anybody do anything?”

“Some people tried to do things--for example, there was this thing called the Kyoto Protocol--but it is kind of hard to explain. It was sort of the Age of Inaction. Nothing was actually getting done.”

“Nothing in the whole world?”

“In some places there were riots and revolutions, there was the Arab Spring, and Venezuela got pretty hairy, but remember I was in the U.S. Here we did have one movement, but even that was a passive one--it was a good idea and all, it was called Occupy--”

“Occupy? Like, dwell, exist, just be there?”

“That was the problem. The whole name was Occupy Wall Street, but the protest was like a form of camping. Protestors just went to the space of Wall Street and stayed, and they didn’t really ask for anything--maybe nobody could figure out what to ask for exactly--so they just stayed there, except eventually they left.”

“And that was it.”

“Yeah, that was pretty much it. But you have to remember, we had all KINDS of problems--everyone was working a ridiculous number of hours for hardly any money, that was the big thing. To go to school, young people had to borrow what it took 3 or 4 people to earn in a year, but then their first jobs were all for free--we called them internships--and some couldn’t get jobs at all--”

“So what did the government do?”

“Wait: so that was the deal with young people, but then old people were also in the shit because they were tired out, they lived most of their lives without health care and they eventually got too sick to work and their pensions got cancelled or stolen from--”

“Stolen from how?”

“Ugh, there were all kinds of different ways, but one of the biggest was that they just weren’t funded. Like, the people put in their money, and then the state promised to put in theirs, but they actually didn’t, for decades and decades. And sometimes a company went bankrupt and they were told they didn’t have to pay what they had promised.”

“And nobody made them? Didn’t anybody know about it?”

“No, I mean, yes, like I said, people knew, but they needed the government or somebody in charge to do something, but the U.S. government, at least, couldn’t agree--”

“So they tried a bunch of different things to see what might help, and it just got messed up?”

“No, like I said, it was the Age of Inaction. Nobody in charge could experiment, it was just gridlock--there were even structures built in, there was one called the filibuster--that meant one lawmaker talking, and the talking was intended to take up all the time so that nobody could pass any laws--”

“That sounds crazy!”

“It was crazy. But because of stuff like this, the government not actually doing enough things to help people, a lot of people stopped trusting the government. They just didn’t care anymore. But for new things to happen--especially new things that might cost money and not make money--somebody had to be in charge of making them happen. If it wasn’t going to be the government, it had to be somebody else. But who would be that entity? And what would be the motivation? So yeah--we didn’t solve the climate thing, and we didn’t solve the economy thing, and people got poorer and the world got more broken, and there were a lot of other problems I didn’t even get to--”

“And that was the Age of Inaction.”

“Yes.”