Ronnie's Blog
I’m going to ask for your help. In a moment, I’ll tell you why.
But first, we at OCA hope that you and your family are safe and well.
Safe from the west coast wildfires and east coast hurricanes.
Safe from major health concerns, daunting financial worries, crushing injustices.
These are challenging, indeed frightening times.
For millions of people. For the future of our democracy. For the survival of our common home.
Despite an ongoing cover-up by government authorities, the biotech industry, the military industrial complex and the mass media, there is growing scientific consensus
that the COVID-19 virus was created and (most likely accidentally) leaked from a dual-use military/civilian lab in Wuhan, China.
The ensuing pandemic (currently with 14 million infected and 585,000 dead, which has precipitated a global economic meltdown) is the predictable, yet preventable, collateral damage of a reckless, decades-long, and accident-prone biodefense/biowarfare program carried out by the U.S. (including both the Obama and Trump administrations, and their predecessors), China, Russia and other highly industrialized and militarized nations.
Under the gun, reeling from an unprecedented public health, racial justice, environmental and climate crisis, now is certainly not the time to mince words nor offer up piecemeal reforms to greenwash a failed, degenerate system. As I point out in my recent book, "Grassroots Rising: A Call to Action on Climate, Farming, Food, and a Green New Deal," there are no magical, easy tweaks to business, politics and consumer behavior “as usual” that can save us.
After the pandemic, lockdown and economic depression, in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter rebellion, there is no healthy, just and climate-friendly “normal” we can go back to. The old red, white and blue normal of Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton et al. was and is degenerate, racist and self-destructive, a 21st Century suicide economy that is dragging us toward climate catastrophe, societal meltdown and what Vandana Shiva has aptly described as a Digital Dictatorship.
The folks at the Food & Environment Network (FERN) have taken on the grim task of monitoring the COIVD-19 situation in industrial slaughterhouses.
The numbers aren’t pretty.
As of June 29, FERN reports that at least 36,561 meatpacking, food processing and farmworkers have tested positive for Covid-19—and at least 116 workers of those have died.
Meanwhile four of the “Big Meat” companies responsible for these numbers—Tyson, JBS, Cargill and Smithfield—are being investigated for using the pandemic to needlessly endanger workers, and to deceive consumers about meat shortages so they could jack up prices, all while exporting massive amounts of meat to China.
Never have we needed to shut down factory farms more than now.
And never has the opportunity been more within our reach—if we can marshal the resources to get the job done.
It’s been a long, strange few months.
First, let me say that I hope you and your family and friends have remained safe and healthy.
Second, I want to say this: If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that our corporate-controlled industrial food system is a failure—and that we’ll never have a better opportunity for transformational change than we have right now.
In the COVID-19-driven time warp of the past 90 days, politics, economics and public opinion have changed drastically. Important aspects of social behavior seem to have improved—less non-essential travel, less consumption, more family focus, reduced greenhouse gas pollution (17 percent less worldwide in early April), increase in demand for healthy, home-cooked foods, appreciation for nature, mutual aid, social solidarity and more attention paid to the plight of farmworkers, small farmers, healthcare workers and food chain workers.
Unfortunately, other impacts of the pandemic are quite negative, in fact catastrophic: massive infections and deaths, widespread anxiety and fear, extreme political polarization and economic meltdown, including a massive number of bankruptcies of small businesses, with 40 million workers unemployed in the U.S. alone.
According to Johns Hopkins University, as of today, COVID-19 has infected more than 3 million people and killed at least 210,000 worldwide.
Those are big numbers, considering the fact that six short months ago, few members of the general public had ever heard of the coronavirus. And almost no one was harboring fears of a looming and deadly global pandemic.
But here we are. As our new reality sinks in, as we adjust to lockdowns and home schooling and long lines at grocery stores, as we look for ways to protect ourselves and our families—and as some grieve for lost loved ones—most of us are also seeking answers.
COVID-19 has now violently emerged, alongside the Climate Emergency, as an existential threat. Our health, economic livelihoods, climate stability, democracy—our very survival as a human species—are under attack.
If we’re going to survive this pandemic, and avoid the pandemics lying in wait, if we’re going to avoid the greatest pandemic of them all looming on the horizon—runaway global warming and catastrophic climate change—we need to take control of our destiny and build a new Green Commonwealth that is regenerative, rather than degenerative.
The frightening COVID-19 pandemic, slowly but surely infecting millions, fueling an economic and political meltdown and metastasizing in the midst of a global Climate Emergency, has pushed a critical mass of us all to the brink.
Words can barely convey our waking nightmare, or fully expose the cabal of monsters and the degenerate “business-as-usual” practices that have brought on this disaster. Like a horror movie rerun, every night I wake up.
How did we ever let this happen? What can we do to protect ourselves and others? Can we rise to the occasion and organize a massive Grassroots Rising, head off disaster, and take advantage of this tragic “trigger moment”?
Can we deal with the degenerative practices that have unleashed this mega-crisis and bring to heel the perpetrators, the greedy elite who created and/or abetted this catastrophe?
As an international chorus of climate, environmental and political leaders warned this week, it’s now or never “to harness our fears, build hope and drive action to respond to the human health, economic, climate and biodiversity crisis with solutions that build resilient societies on the longer term.”
Over the past five decades, as a food, natural health and environmental campaigner, anti-war organizer, human rights activist and journalist, I’ve had the inspiring and at times depressing opportunity to work and travel across much of the world.
Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned through my work is that people respond best to a positive, solutions-oriented message. Gloom-and-doom thinking—the kind that offers no plausible solution—doesn’t generally inspire people to get involved or take action.
That doesn’t mean we should downplay the seriousness of our current situation. We face unprecedented life-or-death threats. We’re up against formidable political, economic and cultural obstacles. We must continue to highlight and criticize, with passion, facts and concrete examples, the bad actors, practices and policies that have brought us to the brink of a global crisis.
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