Humans are highly melodramatic animals, bless-cursed with synapses sparks that suggest there is purpose to existence beyond simply existing. Because of this, humans will lament the smashing together of their broken systems, which have long been failing them in any deep or meaningful sense, and indulge worried proclamations of end times, which are not even true callings of an observed event on the horizon, but just the cries of child creatures hoping to scare away their own fears in the dark of what they cannot comprehend. These are not human systems of existence breaking apart, but human systems of comfort, which not everybody even has anyways. American prosperity got a better view of the world by stepping a jackboot on the throat of the global South, which has continued to this day. Anti-everything activists make their social media calls to arms and plot their secretive signal conspiracies on handheld computers full of conflict minerals, exploited labor, and innate material privilege. Nothing is ending. The something you think needs fixing never existed in the first place, beyond the schoolbook lessons sown into your young fertile minds anywhere on the planet from the most tender and pliable age.
I have helped procreate three children, the oldest of which I remember wondering if it as appropriate or not to watch George Bush the Younger give televised justifications for wars on the global South after Hulk Hogan kicked over the towers on 9/11, when he joined the New World Order for good (but bad), while they were just a toddler. Back then, they were she, because pronouns were binary and we hadn’t all been distracted by a google of digital streams to confuse our own innate stream of consciousness. The younger two of my offspring have lived in a confusing and unsettling time. A thing I always tell them (once they are old enough to handle this, and I don’t think I’ve said it to the youngest yet, who is only 12 still) is that even if we have population cataclysm, and 80% of humans die off in a decade, that’s still a billion people on this planet. People will keep walking into the future, stubbornly, and piecing together new shelter from the rubble, and slowly rebuilding that shelter into something comfortable, and repeating the same settled patterns humans have done ever since they stopped wandering and planted corn in abnormal rows.
“Why not you?” I ask my children, because fuck it, somebody has to live through tomorrow. I’ll do my best to trudge into as much future as I can, but my knees and ankles ache more than they used to, and if it’s too cold and damp, I get a limp to my right hip a little bit, like god has slapped a metaphysical ankle monitor on me to keep me from running away too far too fast. That’s how age does. But fuck it, I can stubbornly walk more miles than most hominid creatures half my age too tethered to rapidly deteriorating notions of home, which are starting to have those diminishing returns of empire’s that are still trying to ride the ripples of splashes from previous eras. The names given to the land I live on might change – no government is eternal, and fuck it, I might even have a handful of aliases to go by myself, depending on the circumstance, but the end ain’t fucking here yet. Not today, not in November, not in the next decade, never. Time is bullshit – just those same ripples of empire trying to force order and productivity and industrial mindset onto once natural human beings. Even if I die, it’s not the end, so fuck it… I’m gonna keep walking.
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