Systemic fear, loathing… and hope
Existential dread blackening the edges of my mind. The world burns, sometimes just smouldering, others bursting into a raging inferno. Is there a possible path through? For how many, for who? Is it too late for civility? I sit with it like a swarm of hornets buzzing at my head. My battle with depression starts from a raw emotional place set in place by my basic epigenetic make-up, my personal history providing raw additions to it in the form of traumas that maybe I’ll be brave enough to spit out publicly one day. The bass rumbling of it, is surely the same as so many others in our modern, global society — the sheer inanity of our existence feeding the maw of a senseless system, or lack of system, by which we are all organised.
I ponder Newton’s first law and wonder if there is any external force large enough to knock us from the course that seems sure destruction that our world is set upon, the craving for “normality” I feel that crumbles under the slightest introspection as I realise that it’s been there since way before there was a pandemic. The whole inhuman nature of our system of indentured servitude to the machine.
I’m ultimately an optimist, in that I can’t help but feel hope that there is a better structure for us out there, that recognises the inherent dignity of our shared humanity and treats us all with a basic universal acknowledgement of our worth. I feel I can grasp the edges in places, recognise that it embodies our better instincts of cooperation that define our unique position as a species rather than that of simple evolution or competition run amok. I can see it only nebulously, and in pieces, more as a feeling that it’s possible than a concrete vision of the future. I cannot pretend to be a prophet with a true vision, as much as my personal vanity would like it.
It feels the ultimate question is how to get there, or even if we can. This is where the blackness bleeds in, draining colour from everything it touches, a dread so complete it steals me of all emotion. I recognise that I bring myself to this feeling, but it truly feels that this dread comes externally, as if created by a monstrosity of such complete appetite it steals the light from the future.
What will it take to knock us from our unthinking course, enriching those who already run the whole show at the cost of everything— the lives of our fellow citizens and those of our fellow planet dwellers, the air we breath in, the health and sanity of ourselves and our societies, the connections we have to each other? I’m terrified that there is nothing that will do it, with the 2020 confluence of catastrophe still seeming like nothing more than a speedbump in capitalism’s reckless joyride, albeit one that is particularly destructive to the vehicle we are all passengers in.
I think I’m not the only one in thinking that “normality”, or what we had before wasn’t good enough for far too many. There are some voices raised, too few, too late? Although the hope comes too shakily and intermittently, I see nothing else to commit to, other than sheer resignation and grief from which there is no escape or retrenchment into destructive tribalism which I cannot morally oblige.
This is my shout into the void, to join that still too small chorus, in the hope that it will snare others to the purpose of hope too. In the hope it will assuage my despair to be taking a small action. In the hope that it’s not too late and the inertia not too great to overcome.
In solidarity with you.