Another World is Possible

My favorite panel from Bill Watterson was refurnished as a primitive meme.  It portrays Calvin at the dinner table with his mom. On the left of the frame, Calvin's mom - eyes lowered to her plate - says, "Things could be worse, Calvin."  To the right of the frame, Calvin is leaning over his plate proclaiming loudly, "Life could be a lot better, too!"

I came out of the 2000s with a crash course in radicalism and revolutionary politics.  At the current rate of the world, I'm going to come out of the 2010s with a crash course in dystopian realities, Twitter induced anxieties, and the glitter and doom of climate change. 

"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief" (Ecclesiastes 1:18).  There is another world on its way, if we take it from Arundhati Roy, and listen very carefully we can hear her breathe on a quiet day.  But quiet days are few and far between in the current state of the world.  Quiet days are a privilege for the disconnected, the book readers, the hikers, and some city street walkers.  Turbulence is the defining atmosphere of our era.  Hot air colluding with frightened humans concerned about the state of their property and privilege, and willing to submit to the storm of too much work for too little play, too much fear for too little love, too many mechanisms for too few outlets for human creativity.

I'm a product of radical social, political, and economic criticism in the era of radical access to information.  Thank God for the journalists that are willing to tell the truth, to paint narratives of the sick realities of the world, and to incite others to realize that, left unattended, the rich and powerful resemble a conceiving beast backed into a corner by its own shadow.  But the rank-and-file realities of those living in the United States cannot escape the insidious nature of the white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.  I'm serious.  The United States is reaping what it sowed when Columbus set foot on this land and deemed the other humans worthy of enslavement.  We didn't get a say in what Columbus or the other colonizers did, but we're feeling the effects everyday when we go to school, go to work, go to the store, go to the glowing screen.

I will never blame anyone for not paying attention unless I know them.  Paying attention to the state of the world is a buzzkill that, done incorrectly, can lead directly to the fourth stage of grief. 

But listen...to a quiet day.  Then come back and recognize that those that deny alternatives for how the world could be, and those that deem any changes to society as terrible transgressions, know that those uncreative nay-sayers are simply full of hot air and fear. 

It's not great believing authoritarianism, the climate, ignorance, and social/political/economic problems are on the rise, but it's the only world we've got.  And in this world, as a human endowed with dignity, there is that voice that echos Calvin at the dinner table - discontent with the way things are - that must remind us everyday that things could be a lot better too, that there are alternatives to life as we know it, that another world is possible.