We give up our power every day to strangers and call it politics.
We give up some of our money to confusing and shrouded institutions based on vague promises of the shared social good. Defense, welfare, research, efficiency, pick your poison just drink it down.
How many people continue to feel these promises fulfilled? When can we call the conditions of the social contracts into question?
Where do the lines of power get reeled in to see what’s on the end of the line? For the water’s getting deep and cloudy to me.
When did we start believing so fully the story that we are weak?
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I’m sorry it has been a week or two since my last writing, but I’ve been struggling with the end runs of my creations. Everything I write seems to hit up against the same wall of revolution, and I have to pause and think if I’m sane or just young. Revolution is a child’s song without thought of the death and destruction it brings, without care for the cost of change.
But what if the death and destruction is already here? What if the revolution already happened, and we missed it? What if the revolution never meant to include the people from the start?
We’re so comfortable with the idea of revolution as the rising of the people, but how would a revolution look if it were to be a rising of the elite, a rising of the already empowered? I struggle to see how it would not look like the state of our union today.
Now comes the part of the essay where I explain to you how this is the case, the part where I lay out my argument in an attempt to convince you.
Why?
Why should I take the time and care to lay out the case for what we see all around us, what we know in our bones to be true without the willingness to admit it to our own minds? We work for institutions and businesses that do not have our interests at heart merely the abstract dollars they move, we support governments that long ago abandoned the pretext of existing for the people and the shared commonweal, we daily watch our atmosphere and environment turn against and attack the fundamental security of house and home around which we center our lives, and we fill those homes with material items we do not truly value in the weakly held belief that they’ll help give us meaning. We wear our opinions as we wear our clothes, easily acquired and worn in an attempt to tell people who we are without the risk of close contact. Any remains of spirit or soul lie either dying or already dead, with little prospect of new life, and we seem to care not a jot because we have Netflix.
I’ll write something more again soon, perhaps, but right now I need to figure out properly what for, answer well the why, for I currently come up short in any reasoning. We all know what we must do, we know that we must wake up to the responsibility of life; trust firstly and foremost in our own thoughts and abilities, and then balance that in the information coming from our universally shared social web.
Yet this seems “hard”, the changes seem too “big”, and so we shall all instead agree that the current runnings of our lives are good enough to keep at it.
Every day we hand off our power to strangers and call it fancy names like politics and economics, and every day our soul dies another small death. How long can this spiritual decimation continue, how long can we keep denying that cry for more? To the point of death it would seem, to the point of destruction, for who can deny they walk freely upon our land. Supermarkets, festivals, schools, public streets, the specter of death dances through these avenues we’ve unlocked for its pleasure, and all we do is complain to our peers online and in person without action.We keep voting for the same two parties, we keep dancing to the same beat. When shall we realize that we are the music makers? When shall the song of revolution swell so fully in our own throats that we have no other option but to sing?