Day 1302 of 1456

Day 1302 of 1456 in trump's America

What a week, huh?

It’s times like this that I wished I’d actually kept at being a writer. Or at least a half-assed journalist. There’s so much going on that I don’t really have the talent to describe, and that makes it feel so insurmountable. What does a college dropout (a philosophy major one at that) possibly have to say about a dozen week long race riots and a violent fascist literally hiding out in a bunker while it all happens. Did he do it ironically, like a meta-callback to his most similar predecessor? “Get it? You see what I’m doing? Yeah, you get it. I’m so clever.”

I don’t know how I’m going to express to anyone who would ever read this that America is simultaneously going through a triplicate of unimaginable democratic tragedies – a fascist take over, a worldwide pandemic with a body count in the hundreds of thousands and rising, and nationwide riots and protests against violent cops in a dozen major cities – all at the same time. I can’t even explain it to myself, so I don’t know how anyone else is going to understand it. What is there to do? What is there to say?

I think about the guy I saw making a music video in front of a burned out building – using tragedy and destruction as inspiration for creativity, simply because nothing else was given to him to work with. I think about the dozens of groups spread out over parking lots and schools and churches who are gathering supplies – so many it’s impossible to keep track of – to get in the hands of people who can’t help themselves; communities trying to fix a problem that someone else put them in. I think about the Facebook groups with strangers who have never met, who might never meet, coordinating block watches and guards. White allies announcing and declaring themselves as allies, with clear lit pictures, and minority community members vouching for those white allies as One of the Good Ones. And those same white allies are not incensed at their intent being called into question; they know why they’re being treated suspiciously. They know who they look like. They’re the ones offering the information. They are also dealing with solving a problem that someone else put them in – crappy white people ruined it for the rest of us, so we’re going to have to try to rebuild trust that we had no hand in dismantling. Those are just the facts. Take the cues needed to fix it or get out of the way. We have no time for anything else; our streets are burning to death.

I think about how inconceivably, galactically enormous words like “pandemic,” “fascist takeover,” and “entrenched systemic racism” can sound and feel to a single human being watching it all, all day every day for 7 days straight. Much less if you’ve felt it for the last 1302 days, or for your entire life, or if you’ve perceived it happening for 500 years to people who look like you. Any of it is too much for one person.

But I can handle “food drive.” I can handle “we’re looking for donations of tampons and pads.” That’s not too much of a stretch of imagination for me. I can handle “liquor and cigarettes, some people can’t leave their house, and they might die from withdrawals.” I’ve been there, at least a little bit. I can imagine what that small comfort means. And there’s nothing wrong with asking for it; if someone can help, they help. If not, they can help something else. I can handle the words, “we need paper towels on 3^rd avenue.” Someone else can manage the words “block captain.”

I always get distracted by the phrase, “Do your part.” What is my part? Do I wait for orders? Who picks parts? Is this a destiny thing? Those are exhausting. When you see something like this Cerberus head of triplet demon agonies that is currently sucking the blood from all of us simultaneously, you can see so many billions and billions of moving parts over hundreds and hundreds of years that your feeble human mind recoils in horror. Millions of bad actors over hundreds of years of oppression and organization and back scratching favors and legal loopholes and shady paperwork and blind eyes and everyone’s just so tired what does it matter we’re all going to die in the end anyway. Where could one human being possibly choose One Part to pick and dash themselves against the rocks of that particular tragedy?

When it gets too big – which is often – I just let myself Do A Part. Just one. It doesn’t matter what. Just one thing. Right now, I’m obviously not talking to the Unstoppable Altruism Machines who march astride god’s glory of the firmament giving comfort to all creatures great and small, redeeming the race of humanity for the final judgment to the space people who will appear one day and demand an answer to why our species deserves to live and join the galactic federation. You’re all heroes, keep doing what you’re doing. I’m talking right now to the people who have 36 rolls of toilet paper and can probably make it on 24 rolls until shopping day this Friday. You know who you are, and we know why you did it. No one’s judging you, I was scared too. This whole thing right now is about no judgement. But things have changed a little bit. Those resources can go somewhere else for a minute. And I know it feels like it’s unbearable. It’s unfair to even imagine one of these kinds of things happening in your life, much less three at the same time. I know you’ve never faced something like this before in your entire lives. But I also know that our species has faced all of this before, at the same time, and worse. With a fourth, fifth, or sixth asshole coming to crash the party, too. We’ve been through worse. And the way things are going, we’ll probably have more worse soon. And when that worse happens, I will say we’ve been through worse than that too, because we will have been then, also. Don’t think about it, it’ll make sense at the time.

That’ll be my overall advice; don’t think about it too hard. Thinking is fine, as long as it leads to acting. And the acting redeems the thinking. And you only need to think long enough to come up with A Part You Can Do. Just one. Right in front of you, if you’d like. That’s fine. Just so there’s one less part for someone else to have to worry about later. Take on two if you can handle it, go ahead. But one is enough, I promise. Remember that. The only number that isn’t enough is zero.