My country returns to chaos, with politics exhausting me and years wasted on media obsessions.
One of my first essays for this site was a reactionary piece to the emerging chaos of 2016. It was actually one of the reasons I first created my website, to examine what place I and people my age fit into in our modern culture. I say ‘reactionary’ because it fit the tone of what was to come from so many creatives for the next half decade, creating content that came alive from the negative forces of regression. After that essay, I wrote a few more that touched on political ideals, what they meant to me and how I was hungry for a more center line. Oh, what a fool to believe it was ever to be.
Today, my country has welcomed back the chaos that drove us to the brink of ending democracy. And I do get how insufferable that sentence sounds, it felt pretty insufferable to write, but it is likely true. Expelling any energy on this whole thing these past few months has been draining. I’ve been getting back to my apathetic roots, joining the millions upon millions of Americans who see no need to follow either political party or a mainstream media that is hellbent on normalizing insanity in order to glue eyeballs to screens and fingers to clicks. Having one party that is determined to do anything and every to damage our nation while the other party has avowed to do not one single solitary thing at all, makes me regret the last few years of my life being a pair of those eyeballs glued to the screen.
They want chaos? Let them have it. Besides, there’s not anything I can do about it. What’s turned out to be the case is that nobody really can change the trajectory we’ve been on since I was a kid. The wealthy and connected class have cultivated enough division to sit back and watch us fight over table scraps.
I do not want this piece to turn into some diatribe. It is only going to serve the purpose of establishing that, until when that next big thing happens, I’m not going to be driven by the drumbeat of stupidity. Now, when that thing happens – and it will happen – I’m sure I’ll find myself, once again, standing in a giant parking lot, wearing a mask, six feet away from anyone who isn’t my direct family, waiting in a long line to get pricked with a needle that has an experimental drug in it. It will be administrated into my bloodstream by a person who had up until that day never done such a thing, but by the end of the week will have done it thousands and thousands of times over. Like last time, I’ll stand beneath that gray bewildering sky of uncertainty and think to myself, “out of all of the actors in Home Alone 2, why this one…”
Not going into too much detail about people or direct parties is something I established early on with these writings. Like watching a sitcom from the 90s where all of the jokes were so attached to the time period that the humor feels anachronistic, laughing at things in bad taste, I wanted these words to have a timeless quality to them. However, here we are again going around the same wheel of calamity as before.
For me personally, something has changed. Being a parent now, I fear not just what is happening to the world I currently live in, but the one we’re passing off to my son and his generation. I also struggle when I come to terms that his grandparents, who love him dearly, are heralding the destruction of the planet and its people. Knowing that so many people close to me are to blame makes all of this more difficult, but I still don’t need to be so connected. All of my life, I strive to learn more, be more aware of suffering, pay attention. To what end has that gotten me? Am I a better person because I take time out of my day to pity the victims of imperialism or contemplate the horrors of wars and the atrocities committed against the innocent? I’m certainly a more strung-out emotionally person, that’s for sure.
The weight of knowing but not being able to make any difference has become a stone that I willfully strapped to my ankle as I wade into the choppy waters of the modern world. I think, if I were to float, it would be because of my privilege, so I must drown in order to not take the breath away from those who are trying to keep their head above the tide. Being addicted to my social media feed of comics, writers, journalists, and a motley crew of nihilists never made me a more sociable or conscientious person. It made me a wreck with boiling blood pressure.
Am I a better person because I take time out of my day to pity the victims of imperialism or contemplate the horrors of wars and the atrocities committed against the innocent?
When it comes down to it, my obsession with the news is rooted in looking at a headline or event then turning back to my family or other unlike minded people and trying to gauge if it is enough to send them over the edge, to make them see what this absolute chaos of choosing an egoist as a leader has done to our country? But it is utterly foolish of me to think that there is anything that could make them rethink their embrace of fascism. They have chosen it with clear minds albeit dark hearts. The 24-hour news cycle that consumes their hourly TV habits has rotted away any semblance of empathy and they’ve decided that – in the words of a tyrant from my younger memory – “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
I think about that phrase, the man who said, the context in which it was used in that pivotal moment of geopolitical uncertainty. It was met mostly with cheers, and from those who realized how interchangeable the word ‘terrorist’ could be, saw their opportunity to stoke whatever flames were necessary. This is not something new and treating it as such is just as much a whitewash of history as anything else. Our country has turned a blind eye to genocide before as they do now. They demonized marginalized people when it was for a nationalistic cause, and they will continue to do so. There’s not much room for hope, I know, and as a parent it does break my heart to think that way. It’s funny to have this feeling of coming full circle back to the moment post-9/11 where I didn’t feel like I could trust my government, that both sides were representing two wings of a corpo-state, and that the majority of people in this country will cheer for the death of perceived enemies before celebrating the diversity that makes our nation special.
The only thing that is left is really to focus on oneself. To be better, to treat people better. To focus nonstop on the chaos is to doom oneself to a never-ending scroll of despair, damned to stupefaction.
