What We Need
What we need, they said, is to get “back to normal.”
As I write this, we’re well into the fourth or fifth “wave” of COVID-19 infections, depending on who’s counting and how. Deaths are on the rise again in many states in spite of increased vaccination.
A few days ago a young black man, Daunte Wright, was shot and killed by a police officer over yet another vague insinuation about registration tags or air fresheners or something, literally a few miles down the road from the ongoing trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd. People are protesting nationwide, with the attendent arrests and further abuses of police power that we’ve come to expect here in the “land of the free.”
Our love affair with mass public shootings got off to a high-energy restart in March, when a man who later blamed “sex addiction” went on a killing spree targeting Asian-American women in massage parlors. Since then there have already been so many public shooting incidents I’ve lost track, and it’s only the fifteenth of April.
It looks like normal is exactly what we’ve gotten back to, and just like the normal we left behind when COVID started, it sucks. Millions unemployed or underemployed for no reason other than that it’s profitable for a handful of oligarchs. Millions without reliable or even meaningful access to health care for no reason other than that it’s profitable for a handful of oligarchs. Millions without access to education, and much of the education they can access deliberately distorted, for no reason than that it’s profitable for a handful of oligarchs.
A nearly extinct middle class. The death of popular leisure. The rise of profit-based humanity, when what you “deserve” as a human being depends entirely on how much profit you’re willing to generate for a handful of oligarchs. It’s hilarious and terrifying to me that just in my lifetime we’ve gone from glorifying the dream of a day when nobody needed to work, to vilifying the idea that any decent person would ever want to do anything but work.
Racism. Sexism and other gender-based bigotry. And of course, always, classism…except some of y’all who thought you were “us” have found out the hard way over the last year or so that you’re “them” just like I am, so now what?
Now What?
Apparently for some folks “now what” is “desperately scramble back to the crap we used to put up with, because at least that was predictable and safe.” You may hear me looking down my nose at you but I’m not; I understand better than you think.
You see, this is a common thinking pattern in codependency – families and loved ones of people who are addicts. The drunk or junkie gets sober and then of all things you, the codependent, find yourself thinking like “well jeez at least when he was drunk all the time I knew how to deal with him.” Nuts, but also very real. I lived through it; I know. Was way easier to lift five bucks off the old man when he was passed out.
So I get it. I also get that it doesn’t work and never did and we have to set that nonsense aside now. We’re evolving – in real time, at high speed, and we’re watching ourselves do it and can make choices about how it happens… and into what we finally evolve.
We have to reject these self-serving hypocrisies that we’ve so fallen in love with. We just love to be the heroes in our own movie, but we rarely stop to think that maybe we’re the bad guy…and the unfortunate reality is we are the bad guy far more often than we like to believe. Not only are we the bad guy, but a lot of what we’ve been taught to believe was good about us is bovine excrement. The taming of the wild land and noble savage by the educated European; the grand and sweeping reforms of democracy that were for white, land-owning men only; the common defense that defended the wealthy with the lives of the poor.
We’ve been coming to terms with that for a minute now, especially for the last fifty-five years or so, since the great cultural revolutions of the 1960’s. Unfortunately some of the terms we’ve come to may be as misguided as those we’re rejecting. Wide-eyed credulity has been supplanted by bitter, arrogant cynicism; is that an improvement? We continue to think of our democratically elected governments in “us v. them” terms, and in so doing continue to fail to understand our role both in our government and in our society; we continue to look for someone or something to blame rather than working to solve the problem we’re complaining about. We engage in empty, performative gestures, but then when someone is sincere we doubt and discredit them.
I’ve talked about this in my own field as well, right? The audience clamors for authenticity but not without ten thousand dollars worth of studio effects on it. We want informed and passionate advocates for justice, but then we give all the airspace to the same fifteen voices working for the same six companies that we always have…unless we want to look smart, then we go off the rails and end up in Alex Jones land.
What about any of this merits any rush to get “back to?”
The Reality At Hand
The reality at hand is, simply put, what I’ve been saying all along: we’re evolving. That kind of behavior, all that hypocrisy and self-contradiction for the sake of upholding a public image that probably isn’t as great as we think it is to begin with, all of that doing one thing behind closed doors and saying something else out in public…it’s all going away.
What we are facing is the stark and inescapable truth that these behaviors work in opposition to the “universal ethic,” i.e. the survival and propagation of the species. It does not promote sustainability to continue turning a blind eye to human rights abuses. It does not help preserve and expand the species for us to continue deliberately making life a start to finish terror for huge segments of the population.
It doesn’t serve the universal ethic to invent all these labor-saving devices and then refuse to stop wasting our labor because that’s the habit we’re in and we’ve come to believe it’s the only way to do things.
It doesn’t serve the universal ethic to keep the vast majority of the population subjugated, even if you can con a big chunk of them into being happy about it.
As we’ve discussed previously, anything that doesn’t serve the universal ethic is, eventually, rejected by life itself as contrary to its purposes. This broken, purposeless “normality” to which we’re all in such a hurry to return because we’re exhausted and confused and scared and feel unstable and vulnerable in the face of COVID-19 simply does not serve and must therefore be rejected.
Right now is the time, folks. This is the moment many of us, and indeed many in generations long past, have waited for. Right now it’s in our hands to shape the future. We have that power, you and me, together. The more together we are, the more power we have, and the more power we have the more effectively we can push back against those whose behavior and ideology are hostile to the survival and propagation of the species.
It was always us, man. Not the big rich folks. It’s always been us – “the people.” “Little folks” like you and me looking around and saying to ourselves “no, there’s got to be a better way.” That one simple thought has been the impetus for every advancement in human life since some fifteen-foot-long pre-Cambrian mudskipper decided it was easier to walk over the dry spots than to swim around, and also there’s food up there.
A Better Way
There is a better way, and we can nearly all see it now. The democratizing of information that has come with the information age has made the structures that protected old entrenched power structures impossible to maintain. It’s too easy to see through now. Religion is dying. Even as we cry out internally for those connections and exchanges of power and energy that are often lumped into “mysticism” simply because we haven’t yet understood their science, we are actively rejecting the superficial substitutes for those connections and exchanges. We’re stripping away all the barnacles and remembering what’s supposed to be so great about all this in the first place.
It is a fascinating and exciting time to be alive. I absolutely believe that the things we’ve done in the last 70-80 years, and the things we’ll do in the next 30-50, will define everything about our species for at least the next five centuries.
Philosopher and poet Zack de la Rocha once posed this thought:
It has to start somewhere, it has to start sometime;
Rage Against The Machine, Guerilla Radio
What better place than here? What better time than now?
It’s here, it’s now, and it’s time. A revolution not of arms and battles and the same stupid pointless escalations, but of mind and spirit, an internal revolution that begins, as all true revolutions must, in the mirror of the prospective revolutionary. We’re going to have to get used to the idea that “a job” isn’t gonna be a thing here in another few decades. We’re going to have to lose this ego-driven aversion to the “welfare state,” because the reality is that’s all any state ever is or can be, if it’s to be a state at all. We’re going to have to stop allowing ourselves to be taken in by euphemism and double-talk, without losing the art and beauty of capricious language.
We’re going to have to stop bullshitting ourselves about who we are, and why, and what it all means, and what we’re going to do about it all, because this crap of hiding under our desks and ignoring the elephant in the living room and whistling past the graveyard and pick your metaphor is done. No, it’s not all magically disappeared, but it’s fading away very quickly now. We are literally growing out of who we’ve always been; I call it an evolution. If you’re a pedant and a biologist you might prefer to say that homo sapiens sapiens is perhaps entering its adolescence or adulthood as a species.
However you put it, whatever way you need to frame it to make it something you can internalize, find it. Because this is the reality we’re in, your moment is now, and the fate of the world really is in your – our – hands.
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