As always, a work in progress…
The unemployed or under employed.
The employed. The nicely employed.
The painter or preacher or pot smoker.
The disabled and abled.
The politically engaged and the apolitical.
The family of six with seven soon on the way or the family of two with one ready to burst onto the scene.
Feeding me with food stamp food or with donated food from the food bank.
Cooking up scrumptious feasts!
Filling me up too at the local dive or finer dining spot.
All food is a welcome reward for walking into their lives!
Pulchritudinous people. Intentioned people. Disengaged people. Plant people. Pet people.
People.
The queer, the straight, the rainbow of skin color, ethnic and gendered experience, the Mormon, the Jew, the Atheist, the Christian – be it Methodist, Evangelical, Metropolitan Community, or somewhere in between, the Wiccan, the Agnostic, the I don’t give a fuck.
Waiting for the rapture. Living for today. Enrapturing. Staid.
The constant barrage of new people, new ideas and new ways of being has made me nihilistic and quixotic. How is that possible?
Because we are all just trying to get by, get ahead, get some head. None of us are so special as to be singled out among a crowd. Yet we are all doing something amazing with our time here! We are raising families, helping those in need, acting selfishly, talking bad about others and lifting others up in thought and prayer.
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We are all such beautiful contradictions. We love people we hate standing next to. We call people our enemies, while secretly harboring resentment towards them for not being our friends or lovers. Is this not just part of being human too?
The academy wants to believe we are living in a post-post structuralist world, but no ones told the rest of us that! We walk each day looking back, longing for that modernist black and white utopia, without realizing such a state causes more back turning and back stabbing, more jealously and more hate. Simultaneously, we want to shit on our neighbors political yard sign because we believe it stands for values counter to our own. We harbor dark feelings for the other. They have to be wrong because I have to be right. And if everyone believed as I do things would be perfect!
Fascism.
Our public popular mainstream media discourse reinforces this us vs. them hysteria. And still, we watch it! We don’t turn it off! We don’t create our own narratives. Why? We repeat what they shovel into our brains. There never have been two sides to any issue. But a corporation can’t survive without you choosing a team. You’re either with Charmin or Shell or McDonalds or Viagra or you’re against them! You’re either with Fox News or you’re against them! You’re either with MSNBC or you’re against them! As if it is now a them. And the corporation is now obsessively outspending the human to drive their black and white agenda further down our throats with the hopes that all we will ever regurgitate is what they put in us.
Think of it.
It’s common for us to hear conservative or liberal. Why not regressive or progressive? Why not conservative and progressive? Why not regressive and conservative? Why not pluralized? Where did conservative vs liberal originate in our vernacular?
The mainstream says pro-life or pro-choice. Why not anti-abortion and pro-abortion? Or pro-life and pro-family planning? Or pro-life and pro-life? Or pro-life and pro-death? Or pro-life until birth and pro-choice until death? Or pro-life and pro-life with choice until death? Or pro-life at every stage and pro-choice at every stage?
We still hear the mainstream use terms like war on terror as if there is such a thing. We rarely, if ever, hear them utter the reality in real terms – like about peak oil, climate change or American-enacted world genocide to name just a few.
Mainstream media is now officially owned by big oil and its friends. And the media is and always has been A CORPORATION! It is a political machine! And it has influenced us in ways we may not have considered. More than we may be influencing each other. More than we consciously choose for ourselves.
Breathe in and let out a scream because corporations don’t yet sell air – or do they? They buy and sell dirty air. They sell water. They sell food. They sell what warms us, cools us and treats our illness.
You know what else sells us all of this? Nothing. Our planet sells all of this to the corporations for them to sell what is free in nature to us. The cost: our freedom from our only home, the earth. Why not buy from the source ourselves?
Sustainability – that’s the future. That’s the present. That was the past. That’s what I’m learning as I continue to walk in and out of lives every day. I can make my own deodorant. I can make my own heat. I can cool my own body. I can increase my renewable footprint! I can build something with people I may not like – because I can build upon a foundation of empathy for every living thing.
I’m officially on a tangent now.
But it serves a purpose. Yes, we must dramatize the differences in order to get specific goals in our world met, at least right now. I must dramatize the plight of transgender, bisexual, lesbian and gay people in order to create the sense of urgency needed for people to pay attention and to get active. Why? Because I need to live in a world where it is safer for people like me.
The hope – we are seeing a change before our eyes. Pluralistic spaces are opening up in the town square. We are occupying the public space with our disparate voices and realizing, as much as truly fair and balanced (whatever that means) mass attention to the human condition and experience may accelerate this shift from the Donna Reed fantasy life that never was to the world that always is, we are always stuck with those whose physical presence is in space and time with us. We are coming together all over the world to realize what has been known for eternity. We are the community we seek. We hold the solutions to the world in which we want to live. We have to struggle together or wander the planet alone – or something new – who knows!
We are living in community with our neighbors, our friends, our families and strangers. If we embrace that fact we can turn off the polarizing devices – the TV, the computer, all of the mainstream messaging that has been polluted by special interests, if just for a moment – and turn on our world!
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