The Fierce Urgency of Now

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about "the fierce urgency of now" in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, arguing that we couldn't afford to wait for justice, that gradualism was a luxury we didn't have. He was writing about civil rights, about the moral imperative to act against injustice immediately rather than waiting for a "more convenient season" that would never come. Today, that urgency feels even more pressing, but the problems have multiplied and intertwined into something that feels almost insurmountable.

It starts with capitalism's most grotesque manifestation: oil companies sitting on trillions in assets still buried in the ground, assets they have no intention of leaving there. They've known about climate change for decades - their own scientists told them. But admitting it would mean writing off those assets, accepting that their wealth is actually humanity's poison. So they chose to lie, to fund denial, to corrupt science, to buy politicians. They chose shareholder value over human survival. The Arctic burns, the Amazon becomes a carbon source instead of a sink, and they keep drilling because the quarterly reports demand it.

This same perverse logic of endless growth and profit extraction has created an economic system where all value flows upward. The billionaires aren't satisfied with billions - they need more, always more. Musk plays with social media like a toy while hoarding wealth that could solve homelessness. Zuckerberg sits on hundreds of billions while his platforms destroy democracy. They've gamed every system, bought every politician, rewritten every rule to ensure that money flows in only one direction: up. The middle class evaporates while they compete to be the first trillionaire.

Their extraction machine extends to human consciousness itself through media concentration and social platforms. A handful of corporations control what billions see, hear, and think. They discovered that anger drives engagement, that outrage equals profit. So they built algorithms that feed us rage for breakfast and conspiracy theories for dinner. They turn human connection into data points, relationships into revenue streams. Every click is tracked, every emotion monetized. Teenage girls develop body dysmorphia from Instagram, young men fall into extremist rabbit holes on YouTube, and democracy itself crumbles on Twitter. The platforms know. They have the data showing the suicides, the radicalization, the destruction. They just also have the profits.

This manufactured rage and division serves a deeper purpose: it fuels the extremism that protects their power. The billionaires fund the right-wing propaganda machines that convince working people to vote against their own interests. They dismantle the state - the only force capable of checking their power - by convincing people that government is the enemy while corporations are their friends. The fascists rise because the oligarchs fund them. The authoritarians win because democracy threatens profits. It's not a bug; it's the feature.

Once the extremists are in power, corruption becomes policy. The law transforms from a check on power to its instrument. Judges are bought, regulators are captured, enforcement becomes selective. The same people who should be in prison for destroying the planet are instead writing environmental policy. The criminals investigate themselves and find nothing wrong. The rule of law becomes the rule of whoever can afford the best lawyers. Justice isn't blind; she's been blindfolded, beaten, and left in a ditch.

It's all one system, perfectly designed to concentrate power and wealth while destroying everything else. Climate change isn't a separate crisis - it's capitalism's end game. Inequality isn't a side effect - it's the goal. Media manipulation isn't an accident - it's the business model. Extremism isn't an aberration - it's the defense mechanism. Corruption isn't a flaw - it's the feature that holds it all together.

In the face of all this, I started The Society of Good People. It feels almost absurdly inadequate - teaching media literacy when the disinformation comes from algorithms designed by PhDs, promoting martial arts as discipline when the world needs revolution, trying to build community when everything is engineered to divide us. Maybe it's a fool's errand, the desperate dreams of an idealist who can't accept that the game is already over.

But I can't help myself. I cannot be complicit with something so fundamentally wrong. I cannot sit quietly while they burn it all down for profit. I have to stand against it, even if - especially if - it crushes me. Because the alternative is to be part of it, to let my silence become consent, to add my weight to the machine that's grinding us all into dust.

The fierce urgency of now is real. The system is accelerating toward catastrophe, and those driving it have no intention of hitting the brakes. They'll ride it all the way down as long as they can stay on top of the wreckage. But urgency without agency feels like panic, and that's what I'm fighting - the panic that makes us freeze when we need to move, that makes us despair when we need to hope, that makes us give up when we need to fight. But fight we must.

I write this not because I have solutions, but because recognizing and naming the enemy is the first step in any battle. Maybe if enough of us refuse to look away, refuse to accept all of this as normal, refuse to let them win without a fight, something might shift.

It's probably naïve. We shall see.

Stay tuned.