This Week
This week, after too long, the pot boiled over
This week, after too long, the dreams of vile tracts like The Turner Diaries, attempted to spill from twisted fantasy to dark reality
We watched as some reaped what they sowed through dangerous rhetoric, walking back at the last minute upon realizing the dangers of feeding the fire; some refused to back down as the sparks nearly become a blazing inferno; we watched as others, those with warnings against what was happening, came close to losing it all
It’s not over, not by a mile
It can happen here, it’s always been happening here, waiting to rear its ugly head, at Waco, at Ruby Ridge, at the Murray Building, at the Atlanta Olympics, the ugly underbelly of worldviews built on superiority complexes, conspiracy theories, autocratic ways of thinking, waiting for the person to come along who would demolish the supposed walls, build the white world they felt was slipping away
One man exploited their voices, not for four years, but for more than a decade, turning the heat up at every turn; he had enablers, but some would never call themselves that
We wanted to think the best of people we knew, but some had already slipped to the cult
There’s the idea of Gnosticism, not a religion but a fleet of religions, all purporting one underlying thing: consensus reality is wrong, and there’s something greater at work. Only those with the right knowledge can be spared. The rest will be trapped in the cycle.
The whole modern cult of hatred exploited the idea of a secret knowledge. Look to Christian Identity movements. Look to a certain strand of resurrected beliefs, like Odinism, a mythology twisted into a way to build a cult of whiteness and strength. Listen to the beliefs that our consensus views of ourselves and the ability to do great good when we construct a society is ripped apart by conspiracy, weasel words for anti-semitism. The suffering of millions wiped away, as facts dissolved.
I’m sick, and I’m heartbroken. For years we’ve acquiesced to the cult of the market, tasting the Kool-Aid of a brand of conservatism involving a cult of the Capitalist, with a capital C. Not the entrepreneurs, but the cult of the haves, the idolatry of industrialists, the belief that regulation is wrong. As some have allowed it in when they shouldn’t have, we’ve eroded the hard-fought attempts at an egalitarian society. The government could be here to help, but we gave in to its hurt. That hurt was the white supremacy that gripped the former confederacy, but it bled into the northern states. We always, too, should recognize that these are often the powers-that-be, rather than the folks who believe in fighting against it in a terrain they know they can make a better place. Now, anything that wants to help, even in the least, is derided as socialism, simply for the involvement of the government trying to do something, anything, other than prop up businesses, enforce white supremacy, start wars, exploit resources, create a safe harbor for toxic, bastard brands of religion.
Still, in the private sphere, we’ve seen an entitlement to a platform. There’s cries of censorship when private entities try to make their own rules. Witness Senator Hawley, claiming his first amendment rights were censored for the crime of … having a book deal dropped by a private company. Attempts to regulate tech platforms for all the wrong reasons. It’s not free markets they want. It’s unlimited access to ways to spread their message.
We have, in our mourning, a sigh of relief. Yet much like the plague gripping the world, there’s a wave that can come back without the right amount of caution.
We are capable of building a better world here. Maybe it’s not in winning over old, set-in-stone minds, but of teaching subsequent generations that we can build a garden where ruins once stood, instead of poisoning the soil forever. We can plant the sunflowers that chelate toxic metals out of the soil. We can build simple, beautiful garden beds, natural wood in the borders, or maybe a garish barn red. We can take the fields and return them to a state of wildflowers blowing in the breeze.
Before the pandemic hit, I decided to volunteer in a way I knew how. I’m am often overwhelmed by people and being perceived in certain ways, so I took to healing the land. Volunteering to weed out invasive species. Carrying large buckets of grey water for hundreds of feet in the scorching hot California sun in the dry end of the bay, taking the water to desiccated but tenacious oaks. Pour the water. Give the oaks what they need that has long been lost. Their roots will grow larger, tapping into water deep below, reshaping the ecosystem to a state closer to what it once was.
Let’s become who we should. Let’s build a society for the better. The weeds will arise, poisonous giant hogweeds that can cause blindness to empathy, that can compel us to mire in the darkest parts of our reality rather than shine a light on it. We can rebuild in ruins. We can unpoison our soils. We can restore, despite all the faults of the American Experiment, that which made us best. We can erode shameful bigotries until they are nothing, allow streams of decency to roam free again.
The world is never on the verge of ending. The world will go on fine until the Sun, now in the middle of its life, expands and swallows us. It’s convenient to think the world will simply end, that nothing has meaning, that we can resort only to hate and nihilism, that it’s all not worth saving.
It’s humanity that teeters on the brink of ending. Some of our flora and fauna may not make it through climate change if we continue to do nothing. Humanity may be part of what dies out.
But hardy plants will go on. Tenacious coyotes and cockroaches will go on. Microbes will go on. The world, warmer, may become a place that gives itself over to the fungus, that strange organism shockingly more animal than plant, evolution wise. When a mushroom blooms, it’s not a new spring, per say. It’s a colony that needs to send out its spores to survive. The mushroom is a fruit; the fungal colony is what’s truly alive. The age of man becomes the age of mushroom, not all of them the kind that nourishes us?
We will cause a wave of extinction, but with every great extinction, a handful of things cling on, give rise to new, unfamiliar organisms. The world may become more of a desert. But the secret to the desert, the thing that makes it beautiful, is the way life finds to survive, to grip on to whatever it can. Agaves and cactuses and kangaroo rats and yes, the coyotes make this bleak terrain theirs, burrowing or drying or doing whatever it takes to make it theirs.
But it’s all that we won’t survive it, at least not in our great numbers as resources dwindle
We should be stewards not just of this Earth, but of each other too
This week, we saw a twisted moloch take siege, uncover all our ugliness
Let’s be the best we can be. Let’s heal hearts and minds. Let’s end a culture of death, whether its war or insurrection or indifference.
The empathy shouldn’t be directed at the destroyers
The empathy should be extended to those that can build, despite all we’ve done to them, despite all the ways we exploited difference as a channel to hate
This week, we saw how ugly we can be
This week, we saw hatred
This week, we still haven’t found the way toward light
Maybe next week