I had planned to post something very different; something more positive. But the exhaustion and anxiety of the past year, including (but certainly not limited to) COVID-19, police brutality against Black people, and the Trump administration finally ending, has challenged even the strongest of us.
The artist is aware they need to put their feelings into their work. This is how we process things. But what if the anger is too great for a writer to pull focus enough to put something into words? Nothing can stop me from writing – nothing except the inchoate rage I often feel, confronting the collapse of society and the isolation of pandemic. Still I try.
My generation (X) submitted our social contracts. Every message we received about our future selves was based on fulfilling the social contract as set forth. If you got good grades, you would be accepted to college; if you received a college degree, you were guaranteed a job at a good living wage; if you followed through with all that, you would receive promotions, better opportunities, and higher income; if you were even more ambitious, maybe obtaining a graduate degree, the world was your oyster. We believed this was true for people of color, as well as Whytes, if not totally equally. That is, if you lived until someone dropped a nuclear bomb. That was the pervasive, constant threat: nuclear warfare will annihilate the Earth and everything you knew. Under these conditions, was attempting to fulfill the social contract even worth it?
Worth it or not, the social contract was broken. None of those things previously described will help you. And, as an artist, you are now only a fool with no means to make a living. You must be working two days jobs and have a side hustle, or basic human rights like food and shelter will elude you. No one in our parents’ generation prepared us for this – not one voice exclaiming this outcome cried out.
Generation X, the middle-aged people who should be in power, are not. We should have noticed that the goals of our elected officials and political parties were turning to self-interest and corporate alliance. We should have stepped in and put ourselves up for representation and election. We voted, but did not understand that this was no longer a practice of democracy. In many ways, we are the ones to blame.
All our money went into the coffers of the banks and the hungry maws of the 1%. But to what purpose? What did Capitalism, which raged basically unchecked for two centuries, do for us? Now that it has failed, what is left? Certainly not the “trickle down,” or the understanding that the good, Christian rich must give back to the society that made them. That idea started to be let go in the mid-twentieth century, and was all but ballyhoo by the beginning of the 21st.
American society was developed to serve the (typically already wealthy) individual. Indeed, Individualism is the strongest ideal we have. But to what aim? What good is money, if the individual stands alone with no one to share it? Money has not served to make these 1% happy; in fact, most billionaires are less happy than the rest of us, who are now grasping at crumbs. Post-election, Donald Trump is effectively invisible – even Capitalist megalomaniacs have become depressed and live in fear. How did the acquisition of piles money so high they can never be spent become our most important, indeed, our only, purpose?
The COVID pandemic has made all this terrifyingly obvious. Yes, the rich have access to medical care, and thus usually survive the disease if contracted. But everyone at every echelon of society has been imprisoned in panic for over a year. A virus can’t tell rich from poor.
But things feel a little better now that Joe Biden has been voted into the Executive Office. Don’t they? What about the Democratic Party, the frumpy little sister to the surgically augmented GOP? Expecting Democratic leadership to be able to change anything now is like betting your entire bank account on a lotto scratch card. The United States and all the nations that look to it for leadership and trade will be in crisis for decades to come. If the United States insists that its democracy can only offer Free Market Capitalism, then it is not a democracy. A democracy necessitates choice – where is the choice between Capitalism Dark Roast and Capitalism Lite? Capitalism, United States style, likes to keep The People where they can control them: needy, undereducated, and unhappy.
What’s it like for a woman in this climate? Retrograde and servile - despite any professional achievements, degrees, or your lifelong drudging toward the social contract. The backtracking from rights already won runs from deeply disappointing to tragic. If you want to show women how little they’re worth, put them back in the home. Women still earn $0.75 on the dollar in comparison to men; it makes sense that the higher wage-earner continues to work while the woman toils at home, trying to educate the virtually imprisoned children, and deal with all matters of family life, over a screen. Give women no money and no social support, because that would be anti-Capitalist; control their bodies by how and when they are allowed to procreate; and make them feel like they will be solely responsible for God knows what traumas our children will experience through this, because it is always the mother who is culpable. If you are a woman over 40, the message is clear: get out of the way and let someone else take that job you’re qualified for, because you expect to earn a living wage. If you die of COVID, or just from not being able to receive medical care, because most of us don’t have any – your body is literally refuse to dispose. Women are human garbage.
Speaking of unhappiness, I recently realized I no longer feel happy. Ever. Either the knot in my chest and stomach are tight, or slightly looser than tight. Those are the two feelings. And I am one of the lucky ones: the home I own is paid off, my son goes to school in person, and my family has enough to eat. To be clear, I am not generally an unhappy or depressed person. It’s not my brain chemistry default. But my life experiences have shown me that an environment of crisis will create unhappiness and depression in anyone who lives it day after day. The isolation of quarantine; the lack of fair remuneration for work delivered; no education for our children, except those, like my son, who are very lucky; the sadness of the sick and homeless wandering the streets because nowhere is safe. Is this the freedom they told us Capitalism would grant? Is this the glory we would feel once we achieved “all for me” Individualism? They lied. No one is free until all oppression is broken.
Here’s what I’m focusing on for the remainder of 2021:
Renewed: hope
compassion
abundance
change
Less death and hate!
Can the decent among us agree that these are valid goals?
Change is action, not the empty symbolism of placards or social media postings. Look to your local community for grassroots ways to help. Change is The People, all of us - united.
Take the slow movement back into the outside world as a chance to envision a better life than the ones our governments expect us to accept.