Clowning Around For The Climate

Our leaders are clowns. Worldwide, they’ve done nothing about the climate crisis except to help fossil fuel companies make it worse - for profit.

What really makes this absurd is that we—ordinary people— are doing all of the work for them. WE are carrying out their orders to destroy our children’s future. Now, we do this for a number of reasons.

Mostly, it’s because everyone is doing it. There’s an inertia. Nobody wants to stand out and stand up. It would make us vulnerable to ridicule and worse - punishment. We could lose our jobs, or even get arrested or killed. That depends on what we do and where we do it. It depends on who feels threatened by us.

When we do something sane, like try to stop climate collapse, people who are stark-raving mad - like political leaders, businessmen, and their propagandists - ignore us and when that becomes impossible, they stop us.
But to stop us, they require obedience from workers, from policemen, people from both government and business, to arrest us, to publicly ridicule us, to break up our protests with batons and bullets. They need people to do their work.
The thing is, those people are spouses and parents and siblings and children and friends. The people they need to crush us are, quite often, our loved ones.

Like successful movements in the past, our group - The Saners - will use our strength and exploit the weaknesses of our opponents. Including the fact that many of our opponents enforcers are our loved ones.
Those authorities are easily subject to ridicule. What they are doing is ridiculous, the excuses they make, the wide gulf between what they say and what they do. Truth-telling is one of our most important tools. We need to do this in a way that entertains, that amuses.

Leaders are very vulnerable to ridicule because their power is directly dependent on being taken seriously. Movements using ridicule defeated Hungarian dictator Vicktor Orban - well, once…he’s back; and Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević - who is dead and won’t be coming back.

Disciplined, strategically smart nonviolent action works. Not every time. But it works better than anything else to make important significant changes when those in power want more of the same.
Our group, The Saners, has the guts to be first. To stand up and speak out and ridicule the leaders and systems who are failing, who are endangering us all. By going first, we will make it easy for anyone and everyone to join.

For YOU to join.

Our movement is small. Only a few hundred who are actually signed up. But every great successful movement started small. Our potential is huge. Prospective members include every person on Earth who respects life, who loves their children or who simply cares about the future.

That’s a lot of people.

But those people don’t know yet that there IS a group, that we ARE capable of taking control of our planet, that we CAN prevent climate collapse and that, once we decide we are in charge, existing leaders and systems become irrelevant. We must let them know.

We must recruit, build our movement, polish our strategy, develop and execute tactics. We must engage with media and the public. We must confront the silliness of the status quo.

We have begun. Join us. Sign up at WeAreSaners.org/join.

In the next article, we will be talking in more detail about what we are doing now, what we will be doing soon, why it can work, and how YOU can help. We intend to not only save the world and create a brighter future - we intend to have fun and camaraderie along the way.