6/5/24
The biggest threat to democracy, to our country, to the world?
It isn’t Trump – that neurologically-glitching, narcissistic convict. It’s not Biden – that neurologically-glitching step away from a political rendition of Weekend at Bernies.
Or even Harris, as Biden would almost inevitably bite the dust and be buried beneath six feet of dirt at best two years into his second term, leaving that unconvincing semblance of a human at the helm.
No. Severe as these threats may seem, a still greater horror looms. I speak of the political polarization in the ol’ US of fuckin’ A. The greatest threat of all.
Since before Trump was elected, I felt it. The faultline growing into a gap evolving into a yawning fucking chasm where those at either side couldn’t hear each other despite screaming at each other across the gulf, much less hope to understand one another and begin mending this ever-gaping wound in our culture.
This wound that has fucking become our culture.
Even now, this void persists in widening.
And this central chasm? Make no mistake: it is only that.
Given the spotlight by the media, by social media, algorithms that only serve to feed the dismal, core dissociation, it’s clearly just the core, the poisoned heart of this issue, and by no means the whole.
From that hub, the strands of further fracturing can be found, after all. Blind feminists, alpha male fucks, and weak little incels. Extreme trans activists – who I am yet to be convinced represent the core and authentic trans community – and the predictable pushback from the far, extreme, not nearly right, right. MAGA Trump cultists and what I once would have called the Woke cultists, in other words.
I’ve become a bit wary of the word Woke, however. I mean, it’s clearly been subject to such a cultural gang-bang now it’s difficult to discern how one might even hope to define it, so I can’t help but feel dirty (in the bad way) even using the term.
Originally deriving from a song that hoped to remind the black community to remain ever-vigilant with respect to the prejudice waged against them, it was thereafter appropriated by the far left and expanded in definition, used to refer to all minorities and their alleged similar circumstances, and was then ultimately commandeered by the right to refer to whatever it was they perceived as despicable when it came to the left.
This word, Woke: it has been fucked so much, from so many angles, that it has become a whore of a word, dripping, oozing with the differing meaning pounded into it by so many, from so many countless angles, that in the end it means nothing.
Yet still, still it burns bright, shining like a neon-blazing sign, like a torch newly forged from the fires of our collective ignorance, slicing through our collective skin from countless dimensions, severing, dividing, fracturing, further serving to crack the ground we jointly stand on all the fucking more.
I so want to be done with your bullshit. My bullshit. Our bullshit.
I want to look away, walk away, leave this all behind me for the betterment of my mental health, and damned be the rest of you. The rest of us.
Yet I’m a part of you. You’re a part of me. Like it or not.
A wise woman once told me that there is a web that stretches across the universe, interconnecting all souls, and while I can’t be sure exactly what she meant by that, I’ve contemplated it often since I was a child. However pathetic and miniscule we might think our individual words or actions might be, it’s like plucking a strand on that cosmic spider-web: the entire web vibrates as a consequence.
Like throwing a stone into a pond, the impact sends ripples that travel out from the point of impact to all edges of the body of water — and so, I guess, inject the notion of the “butterfly effect” here and all that fucking rot…
At any rate, that divine, unearthly teacher of mine believed in me, for whatever reason – believed in us, or so my unsupported memories and current working hypothesis goes – and so despite my cynicism, pessimism, and loathing for not only myself, but the species to which I belong as a whole, I hold onto all that she, my self-described Teacher, told me, who she described as an Artist.
There is a dark cloud suffocating our world, she told me during this same conversation.
And I don’t want to contribute to that dark cloud. I really don’t. I want to believe in the web of souls. I want to believe that each of us can pluck the strands that intersect the luminous beings she claimed we all are and consequently send our positive vibrations across the entirety of the webwork, to cure the disease that plagues us all and plow our way towards collective health.
As pathetic as it may be – and I know, I fucking know it is – I’m doing by best. So I beg of you, at least join me and try. And Nimi, if by some chance you’re listening, reading, scanning my inebriated thoughts, know that I – or less egotistically, we – could use some fucking help. Not dictation, mind you. Like Johnny Five, I only require more input. Some merciful illumination.
I only need to remember.
I’ve never been one for uncritical allegiance or blind faith, but something tells me you know this story, understand my position. Something tells me, my blessed bitch, that you’ve been down this treacherous road before us before, and maybe I have, too. Let me know, at the very least, the details regarding how, where, and why we went wrong.
I’d much fucking prefer a decent sequel to the same ol’ shitty reload.