this may sound slightly out of left field, but sometimes i think we’re a little too quick to react to each other… you know?
like, did somebody glance up at you, and make a strange face or (re)action? it may be because your face looks a little bit funny too, today, and they hate you for it—or maybe they love you for it; or it could be that they didn’t even have time to process you yet, and you caught them mid-thought… ? maybe they were already thought-multitasking and you’re caught up in a juxtaposition of three or four thoughts.
well, five me! six.
body language is important, and so are words, but to be blunt— i don’t feel like we’re very fluent in the language of either these days…
we’re so often distracted and overwhelmed in the first place, wrapped up in the rapture.
and i’m not just talking about the little things, but the big things too.
if you don’t know somebody: you don’t know them.
if they do something in a dark alley that makes you uncomfortable, and if you want to avoid them, go for it, duck out, no need to take that kind of “risk.” but if it’s a neutral situation (i.e. a person who poses no threat to you or anybody else in the moment), why make it charged with projections?
just saying… our threat assessment is kinda cracked out these days, hyper-sensitive, working on overdrive, but not exactly lucid in its clarity.
a playground for the cyber-pharma generation, where toys turn into weapons of mass destruction and terror.
melodramatic, maybe… but all this set-tripping has led to some pretty weird social dynamics in the last several years, compounded on top of our pandemonium dis-ease delirium in all its lingering effects.
i don’t think it’s a coincidence that Gen Z, the first generation to grow up “virtually” disconnected from their elders’ IRL entirely, went nuclear holocaust scorched earth postal on our collective psyche, when cooped up and isolated like that.
they’re good kids, caring, well-meaning, most of them, but they grew up in a construction, a construction of binaries: like/dislike, yes/no, want/don’t want, manic/depression. it’s no surprise that they’re turning to de/con/struc/tion/al/ist philosophy as a way of making sense (aka coping mechanisms). holographic white Jesus doesn’t speak to them, but Marx does… even if they’re just trading one opiate for another.
the science says this one’s all the rage, tho, or so we thought, (oops?); an epipen for your epidemic…
they… these kids, they didn’t build this world… they inherited it.
a privilege, perhaps, but a very bitter one, and saccharine sweet at that.
to most of them, the era when we were ducking elbows to the mouth, rather than correcting each other’s language; and fleeing predators like it was the jungle, rather than trying to figure out if this/that person offended us on purpose—that was a world they never knew. a myth, a historical fiction.
they know only ones and zeroes, and thus strive to be non-binary in a world where that seems like the ultimate rebellion.
a reboot.
to occupy the spaces in between.
it’s a start, at least, but the part about the Matrix that’s been lost on them is the fact that all this code “adds up” to bigger pictures, mysteries, histories, hiccups, glitches, all interwoven with one another (not to mention, this code divides, subtracts, multiplies, nullifies, amplifies, and all the rest.)
return of the code-talkers, it’s a world at war, just beyond the surface tension of “peace.”
simultaneously, we offer up the ultimate in ultimatums:
“You’re either with US, or you’re with Them.”
ah, the old: get with the program—or else!
(who is who, now?)
it’s an imperfect world, and one in which life-or-death situations are such a distant memory that our vital biological compass for survival has atrophied into constant passive(aggressive?) panic.
we went from protecting the weak… to becoming them. and not just in body, but in mind. in spirit. that’s where the real battle for survival is happening, now, here.
there are some VERY real disconnects forming between who we are, and how we see each other. language being chopped up into fractured bits and pieces until your collage of understanding has nothing to do with what i said, let alone what i meant…
(which witch is which witch, in a witch-hunt? which’s which, witches switch, so which is it?)
and i don’t mean to make this sound all gloomy,,, on the contrary, it really has the potential to be very beautyful if we actually start to see each other again (instead of acting like “not sees” and projecting our identity politics onto everybody else).
i don’t really care whose “pride” this offends, or which tribe, because pride is a powerful—but also powerfully ignorant, limiting, and mind-numbingly arrogant—concept. and let’s be honest: it’s not your pride that’s the problem, it’s the messy juxtaposition of offense versus defense that ensues (like endless law suits). the W versus the L, like George W once so elloquently stated… it’s that hill, where narcissistic egos go to die on a sacrificial altar of pride, cursed like Narcissus to revel in wasteful woe, hearing only Echo’s. as frustrated as Sisyphus, exploring the definition of insanity, again and again and… but we don’t talk about MYTH any more, except as the binary opposite of fact, and its factions. we barely talk at all.
shhh…
i’m not even shhhure if we really “read” anymore, but i guess the opposite of an echo chamber is screaming into the void. no, your pride’s not the problem, it’s fine. beautyful even… like a child’s eyes, proud of the precious things they prize. it’s what you do with it that starts to get a bit more “complex.” the temper-tantrum, when that obscure object of desire is just beyond the horizon…
every bit as complex as, say, the inter-section-al-ity of a complexion complex, shades of light and dark begin to blend, blur, and fade, black and white, grey, questions like… what do these things really mean, internally and externally, from one to an other? and to each other?
any tribe worthy of respect must also learn to respect others. in fact, the word “respect” contains the same root as species (speciō , translated sometimes simply as “see”)… something to contemplate.
we do not expect the bear, the bumble bee, the beaver, the butterfly, the tree, the caterpillar, the larvae on the leaf, the moth aloft in the breeze, the spider weaving its web, or the meek little mouse pitter-pattering beneath the floorboards to live as we do, do we?
but we are capable of seeing… how their existence contributes untold things, to OUR ecosystems.
