I’m still on “break,” so this is another one of my brief ruminations.
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Much to my own surprise, I remain cautiously optimistic that we will see our way out of these times.
A great many of us are shell-shocked, on edge, nervous, and terrified about everything going on.
But a large number of us are going to have to deal with a different kind of shock: the realisation that we enabled everything that is going on now.
I see many people hurling insults and invectives at the current administration, and I think some of them truly believe that.
But in others, I see the desperation, the need to deflect from the much harder truth they are trying to avoid.
Someday, there will be a mass accounting of everything that has come to pass, maybe. I hope that we don’t end up with a fake culture of regret, performative anger, and trauma-performance. I hope there is, rather, a deep silence.
The U.S has historically been hostile to silence, so, who knows. But any culture that wants to confront and move through its past has to first reflect, in stillness and quietitude. There is, at this moment, righteous anger and rage directed outwards. At some point, we will have to turn that inwards, and to dwell with our hatred for what we brought about. The Social Justice Warriors among us will try to quell our anger, tell us that we have to draw up more peaceful thoughts and be calm, but they will be wrong. Our best hope is that we get to that point of sheer, blind fury at what we did because only then are we likely to reach a point of real change.
I don’t know if we have the emotional bandwidth for that, frankly. We are so used to covering up everything with the endless noise of public declamation, and so much performative outrage. And, of course, all the podcast deals and book contracts that come with that — in an economy defined by endless hustling.
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Image, “Four Dead Trees,” Edward Hopper, 1942.