The Racket 38 : FLIGHT
Flight or flight.
I can only wish to welcome you to the year 2020 with a sense of hope and resilience bubbling in my chest. To throw open the doors on a new decade with the belief welling in my cold, dark heart that the 2020s will be the stretch of time when things turn around, when I can once again open my news app and not choke on the bile of frustration.
Because who amongst us has grown so cynical as to not at least grasp for a spark of renewal as the year turns over once again? Who doesn't see the eve of the next year as imbued with some notion of a fresh start? New year, new everything, right?
Frankly stated: wrong.
2020, a year everyone seems to want to gift with the power of hindsight, is off to fairly shitty start. If it isn't the American government deadlocked over a bad man's bad choices and how exactly, if exactly, our stuttering clog of a political system will do anything to punish him, it's the continued degradation of the rest of the world's political systems. It's a city of eleven million people in China placed under quarantine because of yet another potential epidemic. It's burning forests and burning outback and burning coastlines and burning cities and really is anything not prone to fire anymore? It's plunging temperatures and escalating heatwaves and endangered species become extinct ones and the sheer volume of apathy for all of it. The overwhelming pall of "what the fuck is happening" is just too much too much of the time.
New year, same old bullshit and please raise your hand if you are absolutely sick of it.
Even this, the first of these newsletters for a new year, feels like I am just retreading the same old depressing shit. Because, honestly, I am. And I see no other option. Or I see the other options and the other options don't work for me. We - the people - are knee deep in some serious bad doo-doo right now, and we can either nod our heads to the digital gods and watch the world burn from the periphery. Or we can open our eyes as wide as they go, take the deepest breath we can possibly manage, and shoulder our way directly into the fray. If this the world we have to work with, and it is, then it is time to stop wondering how we sideline the daily atrocities or how we get back to where we were and how it used to be, and time to figure out how we work with what we have.
It is not time to turn our heads, to turn the channel, to turn ourselves off to a world, quite literally, on fire. Because "everything" is just "life" and "life" is happening at breakneck speeds. This is it everybody, this is where we as a society of landed and it's time to make due with exactly what we've gleaned for ourselves. This is not a call to action mind you, this is not a PSA for doing good and helping to change the world (though you should, I should, everyone should). This is a call for engagement. A call to peek your head above the fray and to acknowledge where we've landed; to stare wide-eyed into the reality of now and have an opinion one way or the other.
We've gotten here to this point, to this moment because we stopped paying attention. We'll only get to wherever we're going if we can somehow manage to start again.
New year, new what?
