winter essays:

reflections on my own stained progress

It feels like a late October day today, the wind blusters and remaining leaves stack on the earth’s floor. The trees look haunted. I wonder if they can sense what’s happening too. I want to collect the rage bubbling within and convert it to sap along the branches. Can dread transform into something benevolent, helpful? Maybe this feeling just needs a new skeleton. Maybe the need to change it is just mine. Maybe it’s genetic, and this desire to activate my empathy is antithetical to the self-importance that surfaces with each news headline. I feel it vibrate through my body while I watch the screen. The chaos becomes more cumbersome with time. This is the part where decorum is demanded of me as decisions are made with shovels, burying an unrequited civility with the bodies already burned. Today, they’ll clear some space for the next one.

You expect me as you expect of yourself, to rise above the decisions of corrupt power and encourage my forgiveness of those decisions. And why? For moral closure perhaps, or the need to practice an ideology rid of practicality. The potion has been altered, poisoned at the well of passivity and good intentions. Forgiveness can’t breach the ingredient, for the acid will only swallow it whole.

I’ll survey your behavior and sentiment because I cannot control the outcome, only a result already established. Survival is tethered to the familiar; a strategy conditioned for my compliance. And I have complied. One action each election cycle does not fulfill the demand of a civic duty and I have been appeasing in the wake of a casket sent to bury me anyways. Forgiveness has its place within interpersonal affairs, where the relationship or circumstance might improve upon the act. Not here. They will not return my compassion in their roars of absolute, nor do they give a damn. My forgiveness offers them complicity, and what will I gain in response? A consequence already committed does not change the damage done. There is not one less travesty because I have decided to move on, to quiet this deafening dread that slams one side of my ribcage and then the other.

Please, do not police my eloquence and I will not police your ambivalence. We are not less responsible for our neighbor because we feel the weight of the burden. The burden is a signal, to remind us that we actually care. Any animosity towards the burden will only amplify the self-preservation I cling to. Repurpose that anger, towards the entities who allowed such vulgarity to exist in the first place. Rolling eyes at the activist online is a misappropriation of emotion. When can we start to expect more of each other? Prescribing “low capacity” and other weaponized therapy rhetoric to things in which I am no victim of. Lest my victimhood is a prerequisite for participation. They are arresting journalists. There is no one left to fool, only those who choose to be dazzled in the ignorance of their own privilege. Privilege works until it doesn’t. There is not a nuance left to be claimed. Blood serves as a translucent for the morality of a movement. What will these hands be washed in? Movements of the past remind our government of their original sin. Some never stopped remembering because the past became the present, in communities this country has been scapegoating since inception. Some are hopping back in after a social order deemed as moral collapsed anyways. Melting under a thin layer of ice, with bullets floating in the water. Whose feeling of fear will sustain the moment?

Hardship is a highly generalized american experience. The promise of it is in those bootstraps you can quite pull yourself up by. The death of a loved one. Sudden illness. Employment ends. These are the kind of struggles we are often sold: personal, unique and surrender worthy. While it is meant to create sympathy and this idea that death comes for us all (and it does), it removes a sense of agency. Demands our submission, that we must accept what is. That way, when an injustice perpetuated by someone does occur (and it does), helplessness has already been invited in, with promises that there is nothing to be done, even blaming the victims themselves. The all encompassing emotionality of devastation is real, and grief often shifts something in us so poignant, we can no longer locate that other version of ourselves. I’m starting to wonder whether my grief, and how corporations sell it to me, is propaganda for something else: to absolve me from putting the pieces together. If I am so engulfed in my own suffering and the distinct nature of that suffering, when the only pattern is that it happened, not why it happened or to whom it happened. Not how often it happened, or the perpetrator supposed to have happened it. The option of solution is removed, if only to lament that this always happens to everyone. Though differently, never the same, and without a coincidence to call upon. Propaganda’s half truths. Taking a vulnerability or an idea that already exists, no matter whether that idea has any bearing, only to stretch the skin of the concept until the outer layer cracks. And suddenly, we are all seeing something broken, our hands partaking in the pull, lacking the regard of acknowledgement, unable to loosen our grip.

I would rather have your hate than your apathy. I would rather have your apathy than your hate. Indecision is a choice, resembling the consideration of both sides and one’s indifference to decide. I think to myself, there must have been a time where I could tell the difference between someone who didn’t care and those who care about the wrong things. When I recall the period or time, I only see both running a parallel line, narrowing at the sign of dogs and cats and ice and brine. If the status quo was going to oblige, and centrism aligned, then the previous presidency would’ve worked. The middle is not a compromise, it’s an indictment on a country who has decided that human rights are optional. That racism is freedom of speech, but dissent is criminal. Centrism’s only true commitment is to absolvent propriety and the whims of whoever is in charge. This is not the prize of critical thinking, just the removal of personal responsibility. By hovering in-between, centrism can conceal the fact that it bears no true policy ideas, nor the ability to actually move society forward. It relies on the perpetual shift in political direction and paints white guys who want lower taxes and women to vote as an enigma.