All Together, Now

I made a statement recently that is both monstrous and true: I no longer believe in the future. It’s an awful thing for me to admit, being an optimist and romantic. Well, it sounds awful. The other side, the shiny, crowned head, is the fact I have not lost my faith. I’ve merely refocused it on a belief that resides in tension with one which cleaves to the future. In that tension is a struggle between the immediacy of the moment (thought, erroneously, to be fleeting) and the scintillating glimmer of that distant and uncharted land: the Future. The Future, until now, has always won. One day, we will do many great things, like take the vacation of a lifetime, or learn another language, or perhaps take up some demanding athletic pursuit. One day, we will have our fifteen minutes (but we want to lose ten pounds, first). One day, our consort will arrive, all dressed in fancy hosiery.

But as chaos descends and entropy sets in, the Future is not looking so hospitable to flights of whimsy. It’s just not looking very hospitable to much of anything at all. Oil is spewing left, right and centre, corporations grasp after human rights, in order to control the political processes of the principal continuing democracy in the world, police run riot in Canada, the USA and anywhere else police seem to be found and there are more refugees in the entire world, than in my country. Somewhere on the earth’s increasingly hostile surface, roam a staggering 35 million human souls; more than all the people in Canada. We are not talking about North American homelessness, which is a separate army of disenfranchisement, misery, neglect and public apathy. We are talking about innocent human beings, picking up what little there is left of their lives and walking until they drop to escape the barbarism of the human animal, when it smells money, land, resources (power).

Ugliness roils, like in that dream some time ago, in which the sky opened and a tornado touched the ocean. The water seeped up through the carpet in my third floor apartment, as I looked down at my feet and awoke, forcing my eyes open. The Boschian gremlins caper madly, their faces distorted with malice, around and around, looking drunk with it. They stab the air, bellowing “USA! USA!”, leaping in the air, as their bellies ululate, threateningly. I wish it was so simple as forcing my eyes open in the instance of these most objectionable, leering gremlins. I am not alone.

As the Gulf of Mexico, its people and its eco-systems become the front line in the war that is before us, it’s evident it is not unique. Oil disasters abound. China, the Gulf, Michigan, Nigeria (but only for a decade, as we slept off our Big Mac Attacks). Every day it seems, the fangs of the Captains of Greed become longer; more prominent. They are yellow and foul, dank with excess and obsession. Every day, the people look upon it, transmogrifying from the friendly, suited, middle-aged (and yet, still virile) Mr. Cleaver of Industry, into a Beast with many heads, many fangs and tentacles that both suck and strangle. The Boogie man cometh. He is right out of the closet and there is no more denying that Mr. Cleaver of Industry is not quite as nice as he seems. He is the alien among us. He is the thief, lurking in the garden, waiting to break into our homes (and steal our pension funds). He is the smiling con man, shaking your hand with one of his, while cocking a pistol, behind his back. We now, officially, have the motherfucker’s number.

Right now, this very minute, people all over the world are sitting up a little straighter and cocking their heads to one side. Somewhere, somebody is waking up with a bad, bad hangover. The true face of Mr. Cleaver, sneering from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, paddling in a river in Michigan, lounging in a cabana in Nigeria (as he counts his money, piling it up in monuments to himself and his pathology) has been seen by those who are not in the habit of looking very closely, if at all. They have recognized, in him, the alien beast of so many horror films. They have seen, with their own eyes, all those evils long written off, that they once passionately knew were real. They have remembered, now. One by one, the lights are coming on, even as they begin to go out.

The interesting days we live in are the dung in which the lotus grows. They’re the stable in which a refugee baby is once born, in Bethlehem. They’re Moses found in the rushes and standing on the mountain top. They’re shattering our most beloved illusions about what the world is and how it works. A shattering apart is a trauma. None of us has really seen the world in anything like the turmoil it is now in. It frightens and it hurts (our children, the lies). We have slept as others have lived this and we have carried on, creating these conditions by our unconscious acceptance of our accustomed privilege. As others, who had little or nothing, were exploited and their countries destroyed by the Captains of Greed, we inflated, obscenely. Our vehicles, commensurately, accommodated our physical abundance. We wanted fries with that and we wanted them served to us while sitting in our large vehicles, tanks brimming with the most addictive of substances on the planet. That world is dying. It crumbles around us and chokes us with its fumes. It eats at us, as we ask ourselves what we were thinking. It’s now our commission to fight the war others have been fighting for far too long, as hope is born in the recognition of the enemy and in solidarity with all peoples of the earth. We now understand we share their fate and lives: The truth, for once.

To begin to truly apprehend the horror of these days and to recognize our complicity (whether expressed and maliciously intended, or not)in arriving at this ignoble station, is to encounter our own shadow. As in the baptismal ceremony, wherein the catechumen descends into the waters of death, to be reborn, ascending; day will follow night, as the lights come on all over the world. Light is one. Light is now. Light is what we are, together. There's nothing more to fear.