Today, I was on a Zoom call with a climate activist, a well-known one tasked with distributing large sums annually to prompt action on the climate emergency. She sat in her cool-toned, New York City condo and attended to her yipping dog as she told me we were all going to die. Telling people that was the best hope for change, she said. Personal fear. "Did you see that movie?" she asked. I had. In that movie, they lost.

I thought about lunchtime yesterday, when I sat huddled with a group of high school students at a picnic table on a crumbling asphalt schoolyard. I work with a frontline youth-driven group that gives in-class presentations about organizing for climate justice. I follow up with interested students afterward, offering snacks and support. It was the first meeting of the semester, and we were talking about bullets falling from the sky on New Year's Eve. It was traumatic, said one 9th grader, chuckling. But they don’t go fast when they fall down, said another, with an intensity that made me know, immediately, that he had a stake in this. When I read him a story about two young children struck by falling bullets, he said quietly that he had made a big mistake.

The people that shoot into the air don’t mean to kill anyone, I said carefully. (They do it because they are furious and full of life and determined not to be afraid, because there is nothing to do with fear and fury, except be killed by it or taunt it.) The young man, who on New Year’s Eve had made a big mistake, volunteered to lead a climate-justice rap workshop for students at his high school. But I don’t know if I can rap about flowers and trees and stuff, he said, shoulders hunched on the vast gray schoolyard. You don't have to, I said. Just talk about what is going on. What gets treated like it matters. Who gets treated like they matter. What does it feel like out here; do you feel safe? And how that same stuff affects the whole planet. The earth is the same as us, and the system is squeezing the earth and us both. To death, I didn’t say, but he knew. I’m gonna do it, he said, and bounded around the table like a 14-year-old with a possibility, suddenly, which he was.  

We have to tell people they are in personal danger, said the funder from her apartment in New York City. 

The kids don’t have N95 masks. The kids don’t have COVID tests. The kids don’t have their grandparents, since last winter. Someone’s dad is in jail, waiting on trial. Someone walked here from El Salvador when the earth stopped giving corn. Someone has been to the hospital with asthma three times this year. These kids know danger.

The students I work with looked up as toddlers. They looked up when the first bullet whizzed past the window. They looked up the first time they packed bright-colored toys into garbage bags and slept in the car for a while because their mom couldn't afford the rent. They looked up already, and they saw it: This is an emergency. And they looked around. Gavin Newsom was posing on a rug in his mansion. Trump was president. News anchors laughed in their suits and big rooms.  

So they looked back down, because bullets are always falling from the sky in East Oakland. So what can you do. Maybe their eyes glazed over. Maybe they said, I’m not looking up again. Or maybe they do, at night in bed, in the narrow angle of sky between the window and the apartment next door. Maybe they become poets or dancers or straight-A students anyway. Maybe they become organizers.

To organize for action, we all need to glance up, especially those of us who have not done so yet. Who reached middle age in cool apartments in New York City, or places like that, and are quite sure we can expect to survive until climate change kills us. 

But we also need to look around. In our society, the assumption that danger can be outsmarted or avoided correlates so closely with well-off whiteness. But some have been living and praying and raising babies for the past 500 years with bullets falling from the sky. The people in the condos need to look at the kids organizing on the school blacktop and know that they have as much right not to be killed by a bullet or a beating or a slow breaking of the heart as they have to not be killed by a superstorm or a famine. We need to acknowledge that if some people can be treated as disposable, ultimately, the whole planet will be disposed of as well.  

This is not a contest. We need to look at each other to survive.