I stopped writing this past year. I did so for a few reasons that aren’t worth getting into. But I’m not going to break my eleven-year tradition, so I’m writing this year’s post for myself.
There’s really no need to rehash how hideous the past year has been.
My mind is always on a loop of rage and despair thinking about how people just accept the way things are or deny reality in front of them, and events of the past year have made it worse.
Things like the unbridled pursuit of profit at the expense of all else, tireless over-consumption, private property held in higher regard than human life, absurdly inflated spending on egregious state violence home and abroad, means tests and bigotry preventing people from having food and shelter — none of it has to be this way. I know my views are far more radical than those of most people (though I don’t really know why abolition and harm reduction and care are “radical”).
But it’s more than this. The past year exposed ignorance and denial about the airborne transmission of a deadly virus. There will be millions of completely preventable evictions and an influx of homelessness as a result of virulent individualism and corporatism. It’s hard not to feel like I’m losing my mind every time I see or hear people using words like “back to normal” and not “burn this all down and try again.”
It’s pretty clear that most people have not spent as much time as I have questioning authority and hierarchical structures. Or if they have, it’s been only to seek personal gain from it.
I know there are people out here fighting good fights. I know there are people who care as we near tipping points. But it’s hard not to feel like I’m caught in a horrifying Kafkaesque spiral. Either I have lost my mind, or everyone else has.
For better or worse, I am a thinker, a reader, and a student of other people’s ideas. And the ones that most resonate with me at this point in my life, at this point in our collective existence, often hang on one simple thing. We have to keep moving. Not metaphorically, but literally. Moving. Dancing. Walking. Fighting. Creating. Building.
Stagnation and acceptance of a ghoulish status quo will only ever lead to more people suffering, because that’s how power works. It’s the conservative effect of habit. It’s the Spirit of Gravity.
And we have to move.
“Come, let us slay the spirit of gravity!
I learned to walk; since then have I let myself run. I learned to fly; since then I do not need pushing in order to move from a spot.
Now I am light, now do I fly; now do I see myself under myself. Now there dances a God in me.”[1]
In my more hopeful moments, I think of Buenaventura Durruti, an insurrectionary anarchist in Spain in the early twentieth century. So as I mark this artificial date on a calendar, I remember his words. And I will close with them here:
“We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the Earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.”[2]
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 1, section 7.
[2] Buenaventura Durruti, from an interview with Pierre van Paassen, July 24, 1936, published in The Toronto Daily Star, August 5, 1936.
