2021 rolling in like,
It's not just 2020, or 2021 though, is it. We describe it that way to distance ourselves from a harsher reality. What's happening now is the collective result of our choices, with no easy way to convince people to change. People, it must be noted, who seem to have a pronounced tendency to dig in harder and harder, despite the fact that they, and we, are already pretty deep in a goddamn hole. Easier to say, "wow! what a year!" than "Wow! what a colossal, and completely avoidable, clusterfuck we've made of everything!" If it's an act of god, a random permutation of the calendar, it's somehow not our fault and someone else's problem.
It reminds me of those people, well me, who avoid opening mail when they suspect a bill is coming due. Doesn't change the nature of the bill, just changes it from a potentially manageable problem into a psychic weight that prevents me from tackling manageable problems. And, let me tell you, America has a lot of psychic baggage dragging it down right now. A host of manageable problems lovingly turned to psychic ether so a few people with a lot can get a little more.
Our task this year is to drag these abstract terrors kicking and screaming into the harsh glare of the real so that we may kill solve them and in doing so perhaps save ourselves. We are running out of time and no longer have the luxury of endless dissociation and prevarication simply so we don't have to clean our rooms. We are hoarders of emotional baggage, we collect it via inaction in the face of solveable problems and it's time to stop.
Well, after we binge this next series. I hear it's really good.
I look at the world, my own complacency and depression, and all I can think of is, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." and all I can think in response is, "Yup, that checks out."
I very obviously have not been doing enough. I am a shell of an adult. I am not trying to remove agency from those who behave selfishly and amorally and continue to shred our communities and social safety nets, but I am suggesting the rest of us aren't doing near enough to fight that decay and not near enough to provide a compelling alternative vision for this society.
the numbers on the calendar don't matter, we all simply have to do better and deal with some scary, but manageable shit. That's it.
