As we find ourselves coming to the end of the year it’s usually a good idea to pause and reflect on the past and take a look toward the future. There isn’t a lot to do when you’re stuck inside, hiding from the deluge and wind, but sit around, staring at each other in the candle light, watching the shadows dance long down your lover’s face, hoping that when the calm finally returns, there will be something of the world left to salvage.
The amount of apathy I have toward the world at the moment I feel is a decent reflection of the apathy that got us all here in the first place. Our planet is angry, and instead of responding to a changing world, and trying to either adapt, or prevent disaster, we as a species have decided it is better to fight each other, and ignore the bigger threats. How can we possible deal with our failing infrastructure and increasingly record breaking weather events when the boys are wearing dresses, the children are using litter boxes, and the elderly are intent on burning the world down around them just to stave off the cold of old age? We are gambling with the one thing there isn’t more of in this universe: time, which, as someone who doesn’t gamble at all, seems like a bad idea. What do I know though, I’m just some trans woman with an inner monologue and empathy.
This year has been hell. Sure, there’s been a lot of good, but I’m sure that my fellow Americans will agree that the general feel in this country is that hope is fleeting. Prices are higher, jobs are disappearing, and even those that “voted for this” are beginning to see just how wrong they were. To put it simply, we done fucked up. How can anyone do anything but look to their own survival in times like this? When you can’t eat, or get your meds, and every day you’re told that society is collapsing around you, how are you supposed to put up a fight?
This time of year there are always a lot of posts like this, and videos talking about the year, but the most pervasive ones I’ve been seeing have contained a message that circles around this: if all you did this year is survive, then that’s good enough, and, sure, that’s valid, even in good times there are some of us struggling, but these aren’t good times, and if we are already, as a civilization, knocking on the doors of survival, at the hands of our own duly elected leaders, then how do we expect to survive when the actual doom comes? We sit on the face of this planet (giggity) and proclaim ourselves masters over nature, but some bronzed pedophile and his Gatsbian court of ghouls has brought us to our knees. We are victims of a terrible intelligence, but that pales in comparison to the one thing we are all victims of, physics, and if we cannot survive a baboon, then I shudder to even begin to imagine the untold suffering that we are about to witness in the next century.
The dams and levees are breaking, crops are failing, every summer is hotter, every winter colder. If these warning signs are ignored, then when the real shit comes, when mother nature tenses and begins to shrug us off the surface of the earth to save herself, then it won’t matter that the bible isn’t taught in schools, or that the girls are kissing each other, or that a Puerto Rican is doing the halftime show. There will be death, not noble, not bright, but total, brutal, in the way that only a cruel and uncaring universe can mete out.
My hope is that this past year has taught some of us that it is easier to leave others alone than to try to control them. Above all, as long as whatever someone is doing isn’t hurting others, then they should be allowed to do it. We spend far too much time caring about the actions of others, and not enough working on ourselves and trying to better the collective. At this critical point in our history as a species, if we do anything that does not contribute to the greater good, it should be considered a moral crime. Take care of yourself, take care of your neighbor, and take care of your planet. One day, even if we turn our shit around, we will need to find a new home, and we cannot gain the knowledge and build the technology we need to do that if we are constantly bickering with each other.
So stop it. Live your life, let others live theirs, stop giving so much of a shit about the things you don’t like. It’s selfish. We are selfish, and it’ll be our downfall. If you care about yourself, your children, your friends and family, then you have to also care about the rest of us. There is no more distinction. Never before has the line “the only thing required of the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” been more poignant. So if all you did this year was survive, then in the next you should riot. Tear down the enemies of mankind that have made you only able to survive. We are running out of time.
Sans Seraph 