Not with a bang but an announcement
‘None is so deaf as those that will not hear,’ wrote Matthew Henry in 1710. Upton Sinclair took it a step further in the 1930s when he said, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’ How hard is it to get governments and investors today to admit that the Earth is dying?
Concluding The Hollow Men in 1925, T.S. Elliot wrote, ‘This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.’ Last week, Ford of Europe AG, a subsidiary of the US multinational Ford Motor Company, announced that its Bridgend engine plant will close in autumn 2020, with the loss of 1,700 jobs in South Wales.
The 2008 global financial crisis began with the announcement of the collapse of Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008. Of course there were signs before that, and with hindsight it became easy to piece together the inevitability of the whole crash.
You could say that World War Two began with the Nuremberg Rallies, or with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, but for most in Britain, it began with Neville Chamberlain’s famous announcement on the BBC, ‘that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’
Hope and optimism are fundamental to the human spirit. We can never see exactly what is over the next hill, but most of us hope and assume that it will be much like it is here, perhaps a little better in some ways.
On the other hand, those in power, those making a lot of money out of industrial production or financial dealing, do not like to announce that everything is unravelling at an alarming rate, and that they have little clue how this will end, or how soon. They prefer to keep things as they are for as long as possible, not to disturb the markets or jeopardise the cash-flow, until the very last minute.
At the very last minute, when all the mealy-mouthed options have proven useless, when all the pit-props are starting to creak at once, they make an announcement.
They resign, close the building, file for bankruptcy, and disappear. We are left, a little bewildered, starting to piece it all together for ourselves. Of course it was inevitable. Why did we not see it coming?
The ecological crisis that ends our greedy industrial era will not make front page news until it is blatantly obvious; when total collapse is beating loudly on every door. Scientists have been ringing the alarm bells for forty years. The clamour of these bells has become so intense that only the most deaf can still pretend.
Now is the time to tell the truth. Now is the time to act.
This article first appeared in the Jersey Evening Post during week ending 14 June 2019
