Something Hopeful, Something Terrible, Something Sad, Something Funny, Something Weird: Part Two
We're all floating on a river of schisms.
After writing part one of this series, I became aware of the writer Wen Stephenson. In his latest essay, “On the Other Side of Despair,” he explores our collective aversion to the emotion. And man, this part made my heart sing: “I refuse to apologize or seek forgiveness for my despair in the face of plain facts, scientific and political, or to condemn others for theirs. My despair is not the sort that says, fatalistically, there’s nothing left to be done, and walks away. If only it were so simple. There’s much to be done—if only to salvage what we can, and to survive.”
Read Stephenson’s essay here. It’s worth your time.
Ok. Onward.
PART TWO: The Terrible
Isn't it strange how we're all
Burning under the same sun?
Buy now and save, it's a war for peace
It's the same old game
But do we really want to play?
We could close our eyes, it's still there
We could say it's us against them
We could try but nobody wins
Gravity has got a hold on us all
—Jack Johnson, Crying Shame
September sucked. COVID finally got me. Then a records-breaking heatwave hit California and gave Sacramento an award for hottest day eh-verrr. The government warned of rolling blackouts. Then a massive forest fire broke out in the nearby foothills. Then came the flash flood warnings. Meanwhile, shootings continued in the city and I assume some of the homeless died of heatstroke. Those who don’t count are hard to count.
Just another month in the Apocalypse.
Unlike a lot of people who can choose to not pay attention, especially those who are doing well despite the blaring alarms all around us, I have to keep both eyes on the void. My 18 y.o. son is a Type 1 diabetic, which means he is dependent on synthetic insulin to stay alive. If things go to shit for whatever reason and in the prolonged disruption of services he loses access to it, he is absolutely fucked.
Not only is the person with the disease vulnerable, the substance created for their survival is as well.
Synthetic insulin is perishable. It has a shelf life of about a month once it is removed from refrigeration. It’s also prohibitively expensive to hoard…unless you are wealthy. Even then, they better be rich enough to have uninterruptible electricity and a fortress to protect their Mad Max stockpile.
When he was diagnosed right after his third birthday, the doctors were elated that he was not critically ill. They said at his age, most spend a long period in the hospital to recover. Parents assume the symptoms are because of something common like the flu and delay consulting a doctor until the child’s situation is a deep emergency.
When my son’s mother called me at work and described his insatiable thirst, I suspected the worst. God, I did not want to be correct, but nevertheless I was. The doctors praised my foresight. All his mother and I did was cry.
A combination of having friends who are T1 diabetic (relational awareness) and my insatiable curiosity of how things work (I was Systems Thinking even as a child) and my dogged hypervigilance (trauma) gave me insight that a lot of people do not have.
Blessings and curses, blessings and curses.
Anyway, nothing’s getting easier, or better. I’m chronically exhausted and depressed. It’s making the difficult but meaningful pursuit of writing nearly impossible. Even under the best of scenarios I don’t know what I’m doing. I have no mentors or community when it comes to the art of writing, no money for teachers or editors, so the endeavor is already foolishly precarious.
All my energies are now consumed with survival. When you start skipping meals and considering living out of your car, things are bad. The compounding barbarity of our ideological reality has me, and billions of others, hanging by fingernails.
Over my lifetime, Neoliberalism has yanked the Overton window so far to the political right, the liberals are the new conservatives, and the old conservatives had nowhere to go but to sell their souls to fascism just to stay relevant.
The mantra: All revolves the individual (remember, corporations are people, too). Move fast. Break things. Embed desire to profit on the rise, and the fall. Hoard the spoils. Leverage for power. Ends always justify means because winning is divine.
The lies of neoliberal meritocracy are playing out like a sick rendition of the biblical Rapture—where the few righteous and worthy rise ever-higher into the clouds while the rest of us get “Left Behind.” Funny how our fairy tales find ways to manifest in reality, right?
Stories are powerful because they beget the meanings by which we live.
Here where I live in Sacramento, California, you don’t have to search hard to find the discarded and lost. Homelessness is rife. Approximately 227 homeless individuals died in Sacramento in 2021. I suspect that’s an undercount. Even here, basking in the liberal glow of the Capitol of the most westest of the West, it’s still a shockingly cruel world.
My father ended his days in the new century quasi-transient, sleeping on other’s couches and living out of his Gran Torino, parked among the piers of San Fransisco’s Embarcadero. My maternal uncle slept in parks and disappeared in the 70’s riding the rails hobo-style somewhere between Reno and South America.
Despite the lauded few that escape to the riches and fame of “success,” the endemic of poverty largely plays out through heredity. Collectively, the specifics of economic policy and the seats of power change over time, but the fundamental destructive patterns remain and magnify. Why? Because they’re features, not bugs.
Author Daniel Quinn puts it this way in his fictional novel, My Ishmael:
“Putting food under lock and key was one of the great innovations of your culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key - and putting it there is the cornerstone of your economy.[...] Because if the food wasn't under lock and key, Julie, who would work?”
This describes the current arraignment of 99.999% of humanity. We can argue about the significance of the cosmetic differences found around the world, but this cultural practice is global. Keeping the basics of survival under lock and key COMPELS humans to continue our system of living, regardless of the consequences. And oh, man. There are consequences.
(Thanks to my sister for tormenting me with Tik-Tok links)
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Unfortunately, the knee-jerk reaction in today’s Rabid States of America to this type of social criticism is a pointed finger and an accusatory scream of “SOCIALISIM!”
Lost in propaganda, few have studied history enough to understand that neither Socialism or Communism were ever truly realized anywhere. The concepts were usurped by empire-thinking megalomaniacs. Power consolidated, they bent the economic theories to horrific effect. Empire is insidious like that. It will commandeer any idea-hat and continue to reign.
One unarguably great mind wrote an essay back in 1949 called “Why Socialisim?” Can you guess who it was? Here’s a little help from a fellow local:
I’m not advocating for any particular ideology. I don’t think there’s any ONE right way to live. Neoliberalism won the game of empire. We all dance to its tune, and languish at its feet. Our great dilemma is how to change our minds so we may imagine new ways to live—ways that do not require endless growth and occupation.
We have everything needed to give every human on the planet what they need to live. We have the ability to unconditionally provide cradle to grave security for all humans. It’s the choosing that remains impossible. Why is it heresy?
I’ve lived long enough now to see history strangely repeat—or more specifically, echo. Mark Twain said “history doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.” Eh. Fascism has returned in full Nazi Germany regalia right here in America. Mussolini gets to be a woman this time around. Even better, thanks to the Fully Automatic Ayn Randian Silicon Valley algorithms, our worst potentialities are caught in a psychic feedback loop.
Sometimes an old song unknowingly expresses a future predicament with eerie precision… Sorry for the earworm. Or am I?
It begs the question, has anything actually changed at all? All the old fears and threats and struggles and tragedies are new again. Just like Hollywood’s obsession with remakes and reboots, the 2020’s are mirroring the 1920’s like a cutting-edge FX blockbuster doppelgänger.
Are we really going to do another Great Depression and World War…with nukes?
If we bother to ask Third World citizens and native peoples and those in proxy war-torn regions what they think of what’s happening to us, they’ll likely laugh and curse our First World shock and bewilderment.
Environmental destruction, famine, war, brutal dictators and unbridled corruption, genocide…these folks have already been long engulfed by what we fear is coming. We took our lifestyle global. What we for centuries forced upon their lands and peoples now comes full circle. Home to roost.
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It’s a self-reinforcing, self-replicating multidimensional fragmenting within our hearts and minds, between each other, and between humans and all other life.
Our system of schisms is well on its way to destroying the ecological conditions that make the human experiment of civilization even possible. Self-realized human extinction is a very real and present possibility.
Bizarre visionary Philip K. Dick, whose pulp sci-fi stories Hollywood has sucked dry for piles of profit after Philip led a life of poverty creating them, described a concept in his book VALIS. He called it the Black Iron Prison:
“So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it.”
PKD’s brain did weird shit. He wrote previous works into new works and then wrote about them in works that he claimed were non-fiction, which he later would claim to be fiction until he said they were non-fiction again. His creativity permanently traveled in the meta. He got lost a lot. He also nailed how weird things really are, and would become for us here in the 21st century.
Walled gardens are everywhere. Nations. Institutions. Companies. Silicon Valley is especially fond of creating them because the digital is much easier to create and control than the physical. Corporations in general are leaning harder and harder on capturing consumers and workers in proprietary relationships.
Want a good deal? Become a member! Get our club card! Want to fix your device or equipment? Need a certain doctor or medicine or procedure? Want to grow some food? You gotta go through us. Only us. Oh, there’s a fee, of course. Monthly, preferably.
Corporate mindsets are actively working to eliminate choice, options, and interoperability. Providing a service or product is not enough. They want total loyalty and reliance. They pursue endless acquisition and growth. And all of them are within the walled garden of our global culture.
Fiefdoms within fiefdoms within a planetary fiefdom. Comply, or else.
In the culture of empire, it’s coercion all the way down. It’s a paradigm so mindfuckingly twisted, any attempts to combat or regulate or “change it from within” become a mockery—reversed into another amplification of its nature. Engaging it just cinches the binds tighter.
The only way it ends is in catabolic death, or abandonment. In my opinion, it’s gonna be mix of both. What ratio of each depends how long we continue to delay meaningful action. Our collective mindset/lifestyle is clearly in its death-throes now, but we haven’t felt enough pain yet to let it go. We’re still prisoners of our own device.
Did Henley and Fry understand the true depth of their words? Perhaps not, but they were definitely surfing the meta.
(Edit: Looks like The Eagles and Hotel California can never leave the walled gardens of Warner Music Group…)
Writer Cory Doctorow wrote about our dark dilemma back in July of this year and that’s an eon ago when it comes to our unending torrent of bad tidings. He tells it like it is:
“If we’d started in 1977, we might have paid some civil engineers to build a bridge over the cliff. In 1988, it was still entirely possible. In 1992, the option was still there.
Today, time has run out for bridges.”
The people (and their proxies) who had the power and knowledge to choose differently for the benefit of all instead decided they liked how things were working for them. So they kicked the can. Again and again and again.
Meanwhile, all along they’ve been scheming and planning and building the path to cement their rule forever. Or at least until collapse rips away the sick myth that they’ll be able to weather the worst in a bunker and emerge to a world all their own.
No one is sure where the tipping point between “increasingly shitty but manageable” and “irrevocably fucked” is. With all the lies and gaslighting and delay and bickering and behind-the-scenes machinations, who knows? Regardless, I’m not looking forward to being elderly.
There’s nothing like crisis (or as the case is, a circle jerk of them) to reveal the hidden and denied. All the bullshit burns away. All the ugly is out on parade. You have to sit with truth of things.
And yet. And yet. While it’s a time of nightmares and revelation and tribulation, it’s also a time of unparalleled opportunity and possibility. Miracles, even.
True revolution is never planned or predicted. And it’s never a power grab.
And Now Some Poetry
Another forgotten poem. Computer says the creation date was September 30, 2019.
Everything Son, how do I tell you everything? What my timeline of scars means to me How they smelted and forged my identity Sowed my fields of possibility Cocked and aimed my trajectory How they cut and bound my heart collectively Enmeshed within this reality we’ve conceived? Most of our time is spent navigating The brutality of the lives we lead Defending against the occupying tide That drowns those who choose to defy And rejects the pain that blooms inside With every crushing determinant stride We take deeper into a story that divides How do I teach you how to be When the pillars of our meaning Are succumbing to entropy While old minds bow and cling to yesterday Unable to abandon the insanity Of sword and throne, of dominating a world Believed gifted to us by a phallic deity? How do I unpack the seduction and lies In ways that don’t spark decimating fires And let side whole mountainsides in your mind Hell-bound condemn your ability to cope Curse your head and heart to turn to stone Kill the joy vibrating within your bones Consume utterly your will and hope? Because that’s the struggle of my lot Fighting thoughts that make it all for naught And my weight less than the burdens you’ve got An illness to bear as things fall apart Kept at bay by magic that must be bought Born into looming fates not your fault— Not of intentions you conceived or wrought Damning, the tea leaves sprinkled on our sea The reading all fate and catastrophe While as we vie and bargain with the truth Overcome with vomiting our fears How do I guide you, inspire you Protect you Without drowning us in my tears?