Call it the Great Gaslighting of the 2020s. Take a glance at some of the headlines above. “Climate change obsession is a mental disorder. “Your body can build up tolerance to heat. Here’s how.” “With a few basic steps, most of us can finally ignore Covid.” “One more Covid Summer. Will it always be like this?”
Meanwhile, in the real world? “July will likely be the world’s hottest month on record and possibly the warmest in 120,000 years, according to climate scientists.”
The killing heat is here. People are dying of burns they get from falling onto superheated surfaces — roads, streets, pavements, patios. Canada’s still on fire, from coast to coast — and nobody knows how to put megafires that big out. Heat domes are heading back to America and Europe. China just saw apocalyptic floods. Oh, and — Covid’s back.
If it feels apocalyptic, that’s because it is. It’d be bad enough if we just had climate change to deal with. But we don’t. We have…a panoply of existential threats. Climate change. Plus pandemics. Plus fascism.
And in the midst of all that, we’re being…gaslit. We’re told, increasingly, that to care about this…that’s the pathological thing. That’s the message, after all, of “climate change obsession is a mental disorder.” What’s “normal” is…indifference. Quite literally: “most of us can finally ignore Covid.”