Fearful Naïvety

It still feels like a joke. Yeah, I know that’s insensitive and I’m lucky to even have the capacity to see it that way. For so many people, it’s all too real. I’m just not one of them. I’m in a peripheral corner, a limbo where the structure I relied on is deteriorating, but I’m realizing I had never been great at conforming to it anyways. I’ve got this dream of rebirth. I’ve got this thought, a recurring vision of re-breaking bones so they can set right and heal again-- but better, more functional. I’ve got hope buried somewhere beneath this weighty anxiety. Most of the time change is painful, it’s chaos. But change is also inevitable and necessary. These moments-- only heartbeats in the grand scheme of things-- are the track changing. Some force, flipping the switch and veering us in a different direction. I feel simultaneously powerless and utterly responsible for this shift. As if I can manipulate the future. There is such a thing as a catalyst. I know I’m not the only one who thinks things were broken to begin with. Now suddenly we have a concept of necessity. Suddenly we have this idea, a belief that everyone deserves a chance to survive and at the very least that children deserve to fucking eat. The shock snapped our eyelids open (except those stubborn few). Fear is powerful. Fear is motivating. It can destroy us or empower us against a common threat. And yet, fear is the common threat.

This catalyst. It’s our hope, our opportunity. Hell, if we can give stimulus checks in the name of rescuing the economy, we can connect that logic to “normal” days. We can acknowledge that the working class always needed to have reliable income, livable wages to support a flourishing economy. We’ve got caps for raises, but none for fucking profit or bonuses for CEOs or for the 1%? How the fuck can you justify that? Things are fucked up now, but they aren’t really more fucked up. They’re just fucked differently. Fucked sideways, one could say. And I’m devolving into this rant because I’ve got all my adult years and some teenage ones worth of rage at the goddamn system built up and I’m seized by this absolute terror that when this is all over, we’ll just go right back to the way things used to be. How absolutely fucked would that be? It’s already telling that there are world leaders who want to fucking sue China for damages because they didn’t contain the virus or what the fuck ever. I mean could there ever be a more glaring, undeniable indication of how closely we are all connected than a fucking Goddamn global virus that impacts every-fucking-one? It’s infuriating. It’s demoralizing. Our world leaders are so busy pointing fingers they can’t see what’s written on the wall or whatever that fucking saying is. We have the potential to walk out of all of this with a new mindset, with a sentiment of peace and cooperation, with the knowledge that we are all interconnected, we are all Earthlings, we are all responsible for this Goddamn planet and therefore we are all responsible for each other. The corrosive greed, selfishness, nationalism, xenophobia bullshit is more toxic than this actual virus and the virus has the potential to be a fucking cure for all that nonsense. Or a least a treatment, an opportunity to recover. To change. Change is violent. It’s painful. And we can direct it. We can’t control it, we can’t really even predict it, but we can wield it, we can guide it, we can embrace it, because change is the only way that any good thing ever happens. Think about it. In order for anything to happen, it had to not have been happening before. So just by virtue of its existence it is in fact CHANGE. It wasn’t, then it was. See? Change. Get your shit together America. Get your shit together world.

You want to know how I envision us stepping out of things? I’ve got two screens up and only one I actually want to watch-- the other I feel like I don’t need to because I’ll inevitably live it. I want to watch the one where we step out of this without losing our sense of connectedness and responsibility for one another. I want to watch us seize control, demand our share, demand our children always be fed and educated. I want to see us at the end of the fucking rope. I want to see motivation, anger, determination. I want to see the ferocity of change. I want to see us demanding to end the use of fossil fuels, the practice of fracking, bushmeat trading, whaling, palm oil, plastic, everything toxic and damaging to this gift of a planet and the creatures on it. I want to see a world of people demanding to save that fucking planet. I’m tired. I’m tired of these goddamn corporate giants raping the economy and our beautiful Earth. I’m tired of communism raping culture and tradition. I’m tire of de-MOCKracy. This illusion of a voice, the manipulation of votes and voters. I’m tired of the pretense, the superficial values that camouflage heinous crimes and malicious manipulation of what are supposed to be a free people. I want the fear of these times to inform us on our fear of everything else in general. I see us rising up to meet our potential as humans. I’ve got this stupid, naïve goddamn dream, that we finally get our shit together. This fucking “watching the sunrise” refreshing new start fantasy that the oppressed will become empowered and we can find a way to both feed and save the world.

But there still is that other screen. Right there in front of me, it wants to make me watch. It grins it’s knowing grin and tells me of reality. That we’re on the verge of global powers both weakened and seeking to monopolize on the weakness of others. We’re lost, we’re afraid, and then we’re at war. Was this supposed to be a hopeful entry? Sorry, but I’m a realist. Well at least I think I am. I suppose a realist wouldn’t dream of that first screen, the one with peace and prosperity, acceptance. I suppose a realist wouldn’t dream of that world house that Dr. Martin Luther King wrote about not so many years ago. When he predicted that we have reached a time where we can either work together or perish, as we have now developed the means to destroy ourselves. And what will we have left behind? Our existence will have been but a flicker of light in an ocean of stars, and if we’re lucky enough then maybe we’d have had some alien observer who recorded that we existed so we might still be known, continue to be in some memory of life in this vast unknowable universe. More than likely we won’t be. I’m not religious, but I’m no existentialist either. I have to believe that in some way our collective experience will rejoin the energy of this universe, but what is lost can never be regained. We have so much potential. If we used it to create, rather than destroy, imagine what we could achieve. And I hope that we hit that switch, that we shift directions. I hope that we renew ourselves and our paths and our goals. May all the youth of the world rise up in unison and take hold of the future which belongs to them. If we follow these decrepit leaders, we all will perish, condemning ourselves to obscurity.