The Stream After the Flood
Amid the great uncertainty of now there is a modicum of comfort to be mined in the cyclical nature of history and in the impermanence of everything, in the truth that the only constant is change. But also inherent in that cyclical nature is the stark truth that we live in a present more like the ignoble past than we would care to admit, a present in which eight years of oftentimes agonizingly slow and flawed progress towards a better tomorrow, inches rather than miles, has fallen to the revanchist whims of a racist coot with a mastery of thumb-propaganda and a remarkable capacity (amplified by illict foreign assistance) for exploiting that particularly American brand of paranoid resentment and delivering it like a gilded, flaming bag of dog shit on humanity’s crumbling doorstep; we live now in a present which lays bare and raw the truth that the stream of history flows above a riverbed rife with the irradiated skeletons of lessons unheeded, ignored, and forgotten.
But, as with a stream after a flood, water always seeks to find its level; so too will balance and sanity find their way back to us – though it will take time and requires our help, not only at the flood-point but also downstream and for future generations. It is incumbent upon us to guide the stream through this dark, deforested wilderness of populist blood-and-soil charlatanism and confront, with honesty and realism, the decades of systemic rot that made it all too inevitable, a rot including but by no means limited to: special interests, two-party dominance, prejudice, gerrymandering, inequality, apathy, media illiteracy, table-scrap economics, dark money networks, Citizen’s United, and the toxic iteration of shareholder-driven connectivity that ferments a clime of retributive, corruptible outrage politics and tribal fandoms that seek not to understand but to pwn, facts and truth be damned; it is incumbent upon us, now more than ever, to save ourselves from ourselves.
Though the road ahead remains long, there are pockets of hope that have been glowing ever brighter since that terrible night in November: the deft pursuit of gun regulation by the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the growing movement they have inspired, turning unfathomable tragedy into bold, decisive action, a potent coupling of the long-term organizational thinking of the civil rights movement and the digital immediacy of Occupy (for a look at how today’s protest movements compare with their antecedents, both foreign and domestic, I recommend Zeynep Tufecki’s TWITTER AND TEAR GAS); the work of a revitalized fourth estate, a dogged middle finger of truth-seeking to the treacherous minefield wrought by the rally-bile of the Orange Malignancy’s demagogical fear and loathing; and the resistance of both everyday citizens and institutional bodies (excepting Congress – retirement, Senators and Congressmen, is not resistance; it is resignation) to the cruel and inhumane policy pathogens of a regime intent on wearing us into submission with a shock-and-awe barrage of horrors, outrages, and alternative realities.
Even now – especially now –, wading knee-deep through the muck of this malignant blight, I am hopeful that the path to rebirth is becoming clearer; that we will, like water, find our level. There is little doubt that it will be a perilous journey – and that things will get far worse before they get better – but it is nevertheless a journey down a path that must be found and walked before history, poisoned by the irradiated skeletons of lessons unlearned that line its riverbed, inevitably repeats itself and the window to sanity and a better tomorrow closes for good.
(TW)
