Unfortunately, there is a war on.
The war is humanity vs the biosphere, and pretending that it isn't happening or that it doesn't matter is lying to yourself.
I could really not give a rat's ass about R vs D, except that we, the people of the world, are on a sinking ship, and the Republicans are determined to enlarge the hole in the hull.
The Democrats have been less miserable but still miserable in preventing or even mitigating the oncoming climate disaster but at least they aren't batshitinsane. (There is also the not-so-little matter of the Republicans deliberately and publicly hindering the fight against COVID-19.)
You got Neil Postman's work partly wrong. Yes, he argued that our attention and our sense of meaning has been completely subverted by the firehose of "now... this" unconnected information, Since Postman died, it's only been magnified with the Internet.
Where you go astray is where you jump from this feeling of meaninglessness engendered by media, to the idea that concepts like meaning, truth, falsehood, good and evil have actually gone, just because we have lost the ability to perceive these concepts.
Postman nowhere says this. Indeed, while he maintains an impersonal voice, it's clear he thinks this levelling and degradation of meaning is bad, done for commercial and authoritarian purposes.
Please - let's not play word games around concepts like false, true, good and evil. Yes, relativism is a real thing, and certainty does not exist, and there are a large number of parameters that need to be considered. In subtle matters, nuance is essential.
But this is no subtle matter.
We are literally destroying the biosphere through waste CO₂ and pollution of every sort, through resource exhaustion, and through the destruction of natural habitats. (If you need specific sources for any claims below, please let me know — I threw in a few I had handy.)
We've already wiped out about half the wild creatures in my lifetime alone. Plastic is now at all levels in all the waters of the world, no matter how far from humanity, and this happened in my lifetime too. How many generations can we continue doing this until universal catastrophe ensues?
The enormity of this crime makes nuance worthless. It is and will be the greatest crime ever committed for all of history. Devastating the world’s ecologies, wiping out a million other species, and causing a human population overshoot leading to a severely degraded carrying capacity for humanity on Earth is a crime that will resonate across the millennia — future generations will curse our names for the rest of time.
There is still plenty of opportunity for mitigation - even to avoid the precipice altogether if we were lucky and technology breaks in our favor. But day by day, we as a species run as fast as we can towards that cliff edge in the fog not very far in front of us.
To refuse to take sides in a great crime which we are all participating in makes you morally complicit.
We as individuals cannot get out from under the machine, but we can speak out, and we can attempt to reduce our individual consumption, simply as a matter of Kant's Categorical Imperative.
As a writer, you have a responsibility to our descendants and to your own ethical and moral integrity to try to mitigate the blow today by changing the hearts and minds of your readers today, not preach a nihilism and bothsideism that engenders complacency in the already complacent, and despair in the hearts of the few who are trying to prepare for the oncoming hurricane.
Please consider adopting a more future-oriented, compassionate viewpoint.
