|
My Good Life I’m sitting in a chair, feet up and hanging out into the sun at the edge of my front porch. My dog - you know him by now - is lounging in the grass and watching the world go by, an example of in the present moment if ever there was one. One thing I’m doing out here is going over some of the things I’ve written in the past; if you didn’t know, there are three different ways to read various essays, performance tips, and a newsletter archive, all on my website. Anyway, as I was perusing the past, I came across a two-part essay that I wrote around the 4th of July in 2023, about freedom - both as it’s portrayed in media, politics, and American mythology, and also what I believe it really is (SPOILER: They’re not the same thing). While there are some specific references to world events at the time, much of the analysis I leveled at our systems of governing, foreign policy, military-industrial-technological aggression, informational control, and scarcity-driven othering not only applies today, but describes things that have gotten worse. And yet, as I sit here on an unseasonably warm Spring day, living the life I want with people and the aforementioned canine who I love, in good health and gainfully employed…even with the daily atrocities, cynicism, and inhumanity in the world, mostly what I feel is grateful. The cognitive and emotional dissonance can be a challenge, however it is possible to hold both simultaneously - gratitude for my life, and deep disappointment in humanity. Nothing that’s happening in the world now is fundamentally new. Are the technologies better, the weapons more advanced, the modalities employed to spread hate far and wide more ubiquitous and easier to use? Of course they are. Are we, as my grandfather would have said, driving ahead of our headlights? Also, yes. And yet, there have always been “times like these” in the sense that every human society and empire has gone through the same cycle of birth, growth, optimism, prosperity, dominance, bloating, degradation, and eventual collapse; the names have changed, but the game remains the same. That doesn’t mean that what’s happening now isn’t unconscionable; just because the media stopped covering Gaza doesn’t mean that genocide is over, and just because ICE hasn’t murdered anyone in broad daylight this week doesn’t mean they’ve stopped disappearing people off the street. It’s hard to keep up with the horror abroad, let alone the sometimes quieter (but more insidious, more accepted, more systemic) brutality at home. But humans have a short lifespan, and therefore a short, survival-focused memory. My ancestors fled what would become the Holocaust, yet there are people today who don’t know about or have been convinced that the Holocaust didn’t exist. Generations after World War 2, there are swaths of the American population that don’t realize that Japanese-American citizens were put in internment camps out of the same government-manufactured fear that has led to immigrants suffering the same degradation at ICE facilities around the country, that led to witch hunts for Communists in the 60’s, the politically-expedient crack epidemic of the 90’s, and the fake WMDs of the early 2000’s. Fear has been weaponized since human beings developed the capacity and hunger for domination. Fear of what? According to a white supremacist conspiracy theory called The Great Replacement, popularized by right-wing French author Renaud Camus in a 2012 book, white people are being systematically replaced by non-white immigrants, degrading our demographic and cultural status. As has been the case with other racist and anti-semitic tropes, this theory has made its way into the mainstream; narratives about “invasion” and “voter fraud” and “a cabal of Jewish Democratic elites orchestrating the erasure of the white race while trafficking and eating babies” are present to varying degrees in U.S., European, and Canadian right wing media and conspiracy circles. Fear of disappearing or being erased taps into a deeply ingrained and primal mechanism that exists in both the human psyche and in our evolutionary, genetic makeup: Our instinct for survival. We have a built-in negativity bias, which in pre-modern times (think tens of millennia ago) helped us survive by allowing us to quickly identify - and then avoid - threats in our environment. Although many of us don’t live with imminent mortal danger - while some definitely do, just ask the Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, Ukrainians, Sudanese, not to mention non-white Americans, and the list goes on - this mechanism is still present and can exert heavy influence on human behavior. Although we appear to be a very advanced species, it’s mostly our technology that gives that impression. From an evolutionary standpoint, we are babies in the lifespan of the world and haven’t evolved much in the last 12,000 years - itself the blink of an eye compared to the age of the Earth - and not nearly as fast as our technology has. The truth is that we are relatively primitive, we just have fancy toys that allow us to play at dominance and destruction, like toddlers in a sandbox. Continued at playfreesport.com…
|
