How to Cope with the End of the World
The worst thing we can do is collectively lose faith in our future
I’m writing this on a train. Looking out the window, I reflexively scout for raised, defensible structures away from main roads. I’ve done this since I was 10, planning for when the time came. I thought a lot, then, about when the time came. I planned how, when the nuclear strike began, my parents, five siblings, and I would initially squeeze into the only room in the house two doors away from the outside, how long we’d last with a bathtub full of water to drink, and how soon we should strike out for somewhere safer.
Imagining the apocalypse is something agreeably drastic and cleansing to do with your fear. But it doesn’t survive contact with reality. When my school closed for a couple of days because of Chernobyl, we treated the potential wind-borne radiation as a snow day and spent much of it playing in the fields.
There’s something in the air, right now. As the far right are normalized by mainstream media and toxic hard-men consolidate their power, it has become clear that the “end of history,” when capitalist democracy everywhere was just a matter of time, was itself a historic anomaly. And those postwar decades, when states actively and successfully shaped capitalism into something that served people and not the…
