One thing anyone who is paying attention agrees on is that there is a time for every season. That beneath, within, around, above, and below us are narratives weaving the fabric of our lives. That we are inescapably part of those narratives, and that each narrative has dominant moments and moments of quiet influence. It is not institutions that have power, it is conditions and and conditions are not changed by supreme court judgments, or by billionaires, or presidents. They are changed incrementally in what we know as narrative shift. Once it was the Gods, today every other person is an atheist. And in some far flung time that we cannot see now, it will be the Gods again.
Is it like the first law of thermodynamics? Have all the narratives already been written, are they impossible to erase? Or do we not see something a God could see? A man perceives the sun going up and coming down, a God perceives the earth rotating on its axis. Or does a God wait to see what the daydreamers will make of being?
I know that people have found it comfortable to consider Sagan’s idea that each of us is a speck on a speck on a speck. I was perhaps one of them once. As I’ve watched what I believe to be an extremely obvious case of the President of the United States dismantling the federal government for capital, I’ve been overcome by a feeling that in the history of our species, we have seen it before and that we will see it again and that this is not something we choose. In fact, all things, including this, are manifestations of the one utterly consistent thing, heretofore assumed to be death: but no, it is the terror of living. It is the cacophonous terror of being alive clouding our minds and rippling between us as we tremble in hairless bodies with new eyes. I believe it is this terror that allows someone to think she is rightwing or leftwing when in fact she has never had the courage to be anything at all.
Which is to say, it is this terror that disguises the obviousness of what is occurring in front of our eyes as partisan politics. There are many people who believe their political party stands for the White House’s agenda, but they do not understand that the White House’s agenda is to eliminate political parties, along with any other organized set of ideas, and that the market of ideas is to be converted into currency and also the promise of more currency, what we call capital. My friend once said, in an argument about welfare, that it depends on how you understand what a resource is, meaning that taxation is theft, and the answer to how welfare recipients get on is that they reimagine what their resources are in terms of communities, instead of government handouts. Whether or not you or I agree with him, what the left stands for is also a design for the flow of money; this is how it envisions provisioning people for survival.
I’d like to say I don’t understand, but I do. Every time I boot up a new household on the Sims, for example, I always use cheat codes to give my new virtual people plenty of money. I don’t even like the idea of my imaginary friends not having enough money, let alone anybody real. In fact, witnessing someone else’s distress is most distressing to people who are afraid for themselves, and most people are, whether they’ve got good reason to be or not. I imagine you think I am gearing up to tell you that this is really a class war, and I suppose it is, but I’m assuming that it is either obvious to you or you are not going to be convinced.
What I’m actually gearing up to tell you is that none of this matters. It’s very upside down and not immediately obvious, but quite plain when put plainly. It is trivializing to suggest that it is your job to win the class war. It simply isn’t. Not only is it not your job to win the class war, but even if you did win it, there’d be another one soon enough. You are not destined to save the world because the world is not capable of reaching a finite and permanent state known as “saved.” So let’s take a moment and let that sink in, shall we? Your political identity is not only an incomplete description of you but to suggest that it should be the primary way you understand yourself is demeaning and sly. The illusion of power is the same thing as powerlessness. Very convenient. But this is not an essay about how bad faith actors sold us up the river, this is an essay about hope and how it lives in the hearts and minds of people in a bad time.
I do not think that recognizing your privilege and using it to help underprivileged people works, because the privileged folks and the underprivileged folks are equally subject to the same conditions, although they may fill different roles, and they will both be alienated the same way by trying to buck them. It’s a rather unfair sort of equality. That is to say, as soon as one attempts to use one’s privilege to change the nature of privilege, one loses one’s privilege, and then they’ve got to go and rely on someone else who still has it, and so it goes, until everyone is angry and distraught and meanwhile the billionaires are cleaning up. I’m not saying that privilege doesn’t exist, or that I’m happy the prescribed method doesn’t work, I am just saying quite simply, it does not.
We know that the world does change, sometimes for the better. The most traditional thing is to suggest that “the arc of history bends towards justice.” What there really is, I think, is a sea of narratives vying to be the story and not just the story of a country, but the story of of all things, even the story of you. These battles are decided at scale, from tiny things to things that will long outlast us.
But how are they decided? I submit that they are decided by what we choose to pay attention to, and what we choose to cherish.
I have come to accept that there is no efficient solution. The narratives that make up conditions are changed incrementally over long periods of time, often longer than a lifetime. We are not specks, we are increments. We add a little bit of juice to a few stories while we’re alive and those stories are immortal. Sometimes they’ll whisper and sometimes they’ll scream but all of that power is the legacy of a long history of humans making choices.
As increments of change, we fall in with the stories we choose, and those stories from very small to very large things continue to shape how society functions after we are gone. They are not choices about what we believe, and they are not values that we perform, they are choices about how we relate to each other. Not how we relate as a gender, or a race but how each of us chooses to approach the act of caring for one another. The difference is subtle and yet profound; political acts which are grounded in love are not at all the same as political acts which are grounded in the politicization of love, even when the act appears to be the same. The language of privilege fails because it is rooted in a denial of experience itself, overwriting it with the political object called ‘experience.’ The politicization of narrative choice is the driver behind our powerlessness.
Eventually that thing which you want most for the world will happen, and some time after that, it will be gone again, and awhile after that, it will be back. You will never get a world that has permanently settled into utopia. But if you pay close attention to the relationships in your everydayness, small to large, and you choose to treat others the way you want to be treated with a rigorousness that politics cannot offer, then you will find the stories you want to inherit, and you will be apart of them when they are adopted by others after you are gone. You can be sure that those narratives will never have permanent rule, but you can be equally sure that whenever they do shift the conditions, you will be one of the increments that got them there. Perhaps more importantly though, every time someone is moved by those stories which you cherished, it will be in part because they moved you first.
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