CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Staying Sane In An Insane World: Where I Go To Find My Center

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Sometimes the insanity of the world gets to me, I feel overwhelmed, almost drowned in it. Then I just have to step back and find my center. That’s what I’ve been doing recently. It’s been almost a month since I last posted, and I generally don’t like to leave such a gap. But at times it’s a necessity. And I want to share what I bring back from this short retreat.

First, the contradictions of the world just pile up. Some of the major examples:

The U.S. military is concentrating its forces around Iran for a potential strike. We hear war is almost inevitable. The results could be cataclysmic, even nuclear. Meanwhile despite a so-called ceasefire the people of Gaza continue to be killed and immiserated, while less reported land thefts and other abuses continue on the West Bank. In a time when the world needs peace to deal with its overwhelming problems, the momentum toward war seems almost unstoppable. All while Trump has called for an insane boost in the military budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion while health care and food assistance are being cut.

Preeminent among those problems is the climate crisis. Despite a La Nina cool phase in the Pacific, 2025 was either the 2nd or 3rd hottest year on record. The past 11 years have been the most heated in the record. And an El Nino warm phase is coming, posing the prospect of temperatures well in excess of the 1.5° C target set at the 2015 Paris climate summit. The world is already beyond that. We are into the territory where tipping points could be crossed. That is already the case for coral reefs, which will have a hard time surviving heated oceans. Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is coming into view, spelling many feet of sea level rise inundating coasts. The subpolar gyre, a........

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