Too many people are numb to the real issues facing us today
Horrible to watch as the U.S. looks at reversing gains made by trans people
In solidarity is how I approach this week’s piece.
I am so distraught at the recent news of our southern neighbour’s administration running after the abominable desire to pull a very real attack on trans people. It has been a heavy weight on my chest all day, and all I can find the words to say is: if you’re trans, this does not erase your existence, and you are still loved and cared for deeply. Trans rights are human rights, and I will continue to fight for this communi- ty’s visibility as much as my hands and heart will allow.
There are so many social injustice issues to discuss as we speed further into the future, and I’m just not sure if my voice would become redundant to what’s already been said by others. At least not this evening, when my hands are overworked already from having produced art all day; my brain melting away at the edges, lusting after sleep.
It is important to declare the act of self-care every now and again to step back from the immediate news and focus on smaller things in order to feel significant again in the grand scheme. Simple pleasures should not be underestimated, for I find them to be at the core of how happy we really are.
I am always listening to music. Not just to drown out the persistently worsening tinnitus that shrieks in my ear canals, but to propel me forward, with more confidence, into this complex future. It’s hard for me to believe that ‘millennials will be the change in the world’, when any action we take doesn’t seem to make much of a difference.
Laws are backpedaling to try and literally erase a community of valid human beings; the price of anything you can think of is rising every day, keeping classes in neat hierarchies - the rich getting richer, poor getting poorer. Climate change is pressing down on our one earth, its buzzer sounding repeatedly for years now, but continuously hit to snooze.
People die, people live, and we’re numb to it.
There is a quote from J.M Coetzee’s Lives of Animals, spoken by one of the main characters. It goes: “We have only one death of our own: we can comprehend the deaths of others only one at a time: in the abstract we may be able to count to a million, but we cannot count to a million deaths.”
I’d elaborate, but I want you to in your own mind given the context of some issues just vaguely mentioned. How do you internalize that very realistic statement? Does it shake you into discomfort the way it should?
Think. Sit with it.
As I continue to press in all my freedom fighter work, you have to get uncomfortable to break binaries and unrealistic societal standards. Get uncomfortable, and reassess your thought-process. Grieve for the circumstances we as a society find ourselves in, and feel warmth in knowing you’re not doing this all on your own.
Maybe this piece has turned out more scattered than I intended, and for that I apologize. It is therapeutic though, I think, that this may be some kind of behind-the-scenes of my mental banter of optimism, pessimism, and the terribly realistic.
Lately I’ve found myself to be thinking such deep thoughts about so many ideas and issues that it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to gather all the flowers into a bouquet and present it with any real eloquence. I’m making an effort, it just seems that my emotions are more prone to coming out in more artistic presentations, like my visual art or prose/poetry/creative nonfiction work.
People die, people live. How are you going to change how we feel in reaction to this?