When it stopped being one of the world's most appalling tragedies, it fell off the media map. It got better, but few noticed. You can think of journalists and political analysts as doctors who treat the sick and not the well, but who forget that sickness is not therefore and inevitably the ubiquitous human condition.
You have to learn to tell the story yourself. For example, some weeks ago, the New York Times led the global media with a story suggesting that the sexual-assault-on-a-maid-in-a-New-York-hotel case against (now former) International Monetary Fund (IMF) director Dominique Strauss-Kahn was likely to be dropped. Actually, that turned out to be an overstatement. It hasn't been, and there are as yet no indications that it will be.
If you accepted the Times interpretation, however, the prosecution, and maybe feminism and justice were already defeated. Tell the story a different way, however, and you might react differently as well: a man with, apparently, a long track record of barbaric behavior was outed and lost his (colossal) power as a result.
After all, Strauss-Kahn resigned from the IMF. And recently another alleged victim of his sexual violence stepped forward saying, "I want to be heard because perhaps, finally, there's a chance I will be listened to." She was not alone. Thanks to what happened in New York, sexual politics in France changed, with assault and harassment charges suddenly on the rise now that women think they might have a chance of being listened to.
In the meantime, the dubious doings of the IMF, an organization that assaults whole nations economically, were further exposed. Think of the IMF as the global version of an inner-city lending or furniture-selling racket that lures in the desperate -- people who need a small loan, poor countries that need a bailout -- and bleeds them for years, bending them to its will.
Nor has it been a good year for the men who are accustomed to ruling the world, whether via a global string of tabloids, the IMF, or by holding dictatorial power in any of a string of Arab states. They are being held accountable in ways they clearly never anticipated. You can add the former and present tyrants of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and a few other countries to the list of men whom the wheel of fortune has knocked down or rocked lately, and you know that the rulers of countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are scared.
And here's a hopeful story that didn't get a lot of play: rebellious Egyptians prevented their interim government from taking an IMF loan. Years earlier, Argentina had freed itself from the IMF and its imposition of economic measures that favor international corporations (while immiserating ordinary citizens), thanks to loans from oil-rich Venezuela. Freedom from the IMF, the World Bank, and the United States is, in fact, part of the remarkable achievement of Latin America in the past decade -- and part of what you probably haven't read much about.
It's nice that the Arab Spring continues to get attention into the summer of its discontent, but hardly anyone adds up the amazing developments in South America over the past dozen years: a very successful revolution in slo-mo in which even Peru elected a progressive this summer. And yet the elected officials -- including Brazil's first woman president, a former left-wing insurgent, political prisoner, and torture victim -- are just the tip of the iceberg. Indigenous resurgences, growing popular environmental and human rights movements, reborn civil societies, and a new language of political possibility matter more.
Climate of Resistance
You probably also haven't heard much, if anything, about the sixty-one First Nations -- as Canadians call them; we'd call them sovereign tribes -- that have signed on to oppose building a tar-sands pipeline across western Canada. And speaking of climate change, you might not know that environmental activists in the U.S. have prevented more than 100 coal-fired power plants from being built here, a signal victory when it comes to keeping more greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere, and so a signal victory for the climate movement.
If you were just reading your local newspaper or watching the TV news, you also might not know that a potentially massive action to protest the possibility of President Obama approving a new tar-sands pipeline that would stretch from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is taking place in Washington this August. Nor might you realize that antinuclear activists have been successful in preventing any new nuclear power plants from being completed in this country since the 1970s -- by raising public awareness and safety standards high enough to make them unprofitable. Of course, they would always have been unprofitable if the private profiteers who build them had to pay for insurance and radioactive waste disposal (costs that you, dear taxpayer, are expected to pick up for them).
Mostly the news on climate change, when attention is paid, focuses on the fact that it's here in terrifying form: heat waves, gigantic forest fires, torrential floods, record tornadoes, massive droughts, the increasingly usual faces of the apocalypse. By the way, 223 heat records were just broken in the summer heat wave that has gripped North America, and that number is still rising.
What's ignored is that we could do something about it, that people are doing something about it. Australia, for instance, just passed a stiff carbon tax, and while some climate activists don't consider that a particularly constructive way to go, it is a case of a large nation trying to take a serious step to address a truly threatening problem.
More importantly, a host of small and not-so-small nongovernmental organizations across the world are doing a host of things about it. Speaking of surprises, recently Mayor Bloomberg of New York gave $50 million to the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign, about the biggest and most unexpected contribution to the climate-change campaign in this country.
Another World Is Here
It's hard for me not to get distracted by victories that matter. There are not nearly enough of them and they're not on the scale I... well, hope for, but they are evidence of what's possible. Sometimes they're tiny. There was a traffic accident the other day in my hometown, and the local newspaper said that the doctor who was killed was married with children. A day or two later, a bigger feature made it clear that the deceased man had left behind a husband as well as two children, and I was pleased to see that, amid a private tragedy, what was once extraordinary is now ordinary. Victory sometimes seems so quotidian that you have to look twice to notice it. And if you're not careful, you'll forget what heroic toil over so many decades transformed the world, making the impossible become ordinary.
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