I’m torn. I have told myself that I write for publication, to be seen. To get paid. And I’ve had this website for years now, for the sole purpose of ‘doing something with it’. I am increasingly getting paid for what I do, and the more notice I get the more I find myself drawn to this site as my repository for stories. Something to leave my family when my days are done. I no longer feel the driving pull to communicate with faceless readers, or weigh in on anything.
Before summer, I erased all my social media. I was starving on a daily diet of it, the babble of it all. The thing that had drawn me to the internet, the quiet insertion of a scalpel, and a place to tuck my thoughts, began to arouse a horror in me. I felt an infection spreading through me. It became unmanageable. I walked through my day thinking of ways I could die. Not depression, and not a wish to die. Just a notion that I could, if the pressure of knowing I was witnessing a genocide, that our ecology is fucked, and we have chosen to let it all happen got to be too much. So I saw myself cascading over the edge of my favorite viewing spot up the alley from my house. Not a wish to die, just a mute understanding that the poison was taking over.
So I purged myself. I didn’t replace one crappy ap with another one. All is silence in the cyber world. I am more peaceful. Those images are with me less. And the reality of where we are is… unmanageable. Not panicking, because I knew the monsters were winning. As long as we’re plugged in, messages bombard us with ‘facts’. Mirrors are placed away from the very real tragedies unfolding daily, and replaced with people prognosticating useless words while the truth unspools in our water, and in the bodies in the rubble in Palestine.
Words are being outlawed in the first foray into total control of our resources. It isn’t personal. They just want all of what’s left, and they have to handle this transition daintily. I have no words that haven’t already been spoken by people far smarter, deeper and more connected to universal truth and suffering than I ever will be. I have nothing but what my eyes are filtering, and what my experiences collate daily, with ICE crawling all over my town and county, with people saying poison into the air about how it’s all part of a better plan. None of this was predestined. It was a choice. And then another one. And civilizations were built on it. And schools were created around it.
And now our children are being shot and bleeding out in these places they are learning the hard truth, which is we are cogs, building empire for the few, and as the lies they tell us disappear, our children’s blood is the sacrifice. Along with our pensions. Our social security. Think of those two words, and then laugh til you cry mother fucker. The party? Is over. As the natural world preps to purge us, old white men gather to carve up what’s left. Those of us who survive to serve them will wish we hadn’t.
And I can know these things and still be strangely at peace. So much suffering has gone into the making of this ‘union’. Who am I to give up when I can finally see the field we’ve been battling on so clearly? What makes me different than the indigenous, or those who were enslaved? My birthright is this country, and I’ve learned my lessons. I know I am not separate for the suffering of all the silenced voices. They have been waiting for me. We don’t outrun evil. There are deeper laws, and we all have to abide by them, even the ones creating it. If you don’t stand up now, you’ll kneel before them later. Until the earth decides to evict every last one of us and get on with regenerating. Like we were never here.
I like the idea of this clean place I’ve created. A little voice in the ether. I was here, and even though it didn’t matter at all, I loved. I lived. And I knew the truth. That’s enough.