I was looking back over past January posts, from previous, years, hoping for a little inspiration – and yeah, I think I got a little one, not a motherlode.
January of 2021 broke me a bit, the four years of chaotic cruelty culminating in an insurrection … yep, that one left a mark. I’m not the only one, I know that. But January 6, 2022, man, it was a tough day to get through.
It’s so hard to be patient and wait for justice to happen. The January 6 commission is doing its best, but it is slow work, mostly because they are striving to be sure their evidence is titanium-clad and there is no chance that these villains can weasel out of the charges the commission is working to bring. I’m trying to be patient, but seeing butts in jail cells would do a lot for my peace of mind and my entire outlook on life in general.
And we’re also heading toward another hard anniversary, the day we realized Coronavirus was here to stay a while. Not just two weeks. Oh, how naive we were. How … innocent. And what a roiling, chaotic, anarchistic time it has brought with it. I never imagined we’d be in a situation where Americans were literally walking around deliberately infecting other Americans … but I should have known. They gave blankets laced with smallpox virus to the First Actual Americans, so why should this be any different, really? It’s just on a larger scale. To conservative minds, liberals have literally become “other,” to be feared. We’re no longer siblings and parents and neighbors and friends, barely tolerated for our PC feminist bullshit, but now actual enemies.
Of course, to liberals, conservatives are also “other.” We are just as horrified by their lack of give-a-shit for their communities as they are by our willingness to have untested Satan Juice injected into our arms in the name of “science.” And putting your faith in God is all well and good, but remember that God helps those who help themselves, and if you aren’t using the tools around you to help yourself, you’re not giving the dude anything to work with, dig? It’s a partnership, not a fairy-godfather situation.
And of course, climate change is also becoming ever more clear. It can be 40-50 degrees colder or hotter one day to the next right now, at least here in Iowa, routinely. That’s never happened in my lifetime, nor in my parents’ lifetime. So yay, another thing to get slapped in the face with. Which we need.
You know how when you’re ignoring some little oddball symptom that is actually kind of troubling, but you don’t go to the doctor because you don’t want to know?
Of course you do, if not because you do it to yourself, but there is definitely someone in your life who does it all the time and it drives you crazy. Yeah. That. And then something happens that you can’t actually ignore, and you end up in the ICU because you have unmanaged this thing or untreatable that thing, or … whatever. It’s too late to ever get back to what you had before. Hold that thought.
Earth, Gaia, is a system. And She has quite a personality. And She has been giving us warnings, signals, showing us symptoms, for decades, maybe over a century. And we have been ignoring those signals for whatever reason – greed, convenience, ignorance, pride, not wanting to know. And now so many things are going haywire that we don’t know what to try to solve first, and Earth is going to be in the celestial ICU within another decade or so if we don’t fucking do something. But what? And we still don’t want to know.
There’s a pandemic, climate change is intensifying, people are becoming more bellicose by the minute, great swaths of ocean are dying, wildfires are raging, the uber-wealthy keep sucking money up from the poor and middle classes like a giant Hoover, more kids get sick and starve, more families get splintered by war … it’s all part of the same thing. It’s about wanting to be in control. Wealthy white men thinking they’re entitled to everything they want and the rest of us can fuck off. This handful of assholes is single-handedly destroying the world.
I don’t think being as nasty as they are in the opposite direction is going to help.
It just seems to make people more angry, and that’s not what we need. We can’t just drag all the useless obstructionists out of the Senate and the Congress and burn them at the stake, satisfying though that would be. We can’t just order Bezos and Musk to divvy up their hoard amongst the rest of us, though if they were fractionally decent people they’d just do that. “You can keep 5 billion dollars each. That’s still richer than Croesus. The rest gets returned to the actual economy. And no naughty hiding assets in offshore bank accounts or convoluted investment schemes.”
Oh, loves, I’m just fantasizing. I have no solutions. All I can do is offer love. And offer my compassion for those who are tuned in to receive it. And try to do my best to be a strong, assertive, bold, kind, soft, tender badass with really, really good boundaries. We are all in the same storm. I have some plank to share, if you need it. Wait, have you been vaccinated ..? And so it goes …