Damage is a Given

The heavy rains are rich with life in the Spring. Even when the lilacs have died and the wafting scent of lily-of-the-valley has faded. Summer will come very soon, although it seems a long Spring this time and that is something to celebrate because it freshens the air and whispers its promises. We all want to believe in those promises and so we do because it is all we can really count on now. Nothing else seems true or predictable. We know only that Summer such as it will be will come as it always has. That does not change overnight, as so many things have.

I no longer click on and watch the terrifying red banners they dish out now with the weather forecasts on the internet. It is going to rain. I know this because we can see the pale underbelly of the leaves and taste the moss flavour of the air. And there will be storms alive in the sky. And if the sky is tinged with green there may be tornadoes although they are rare in this area. We do not think about them really. What would we do anyway? We watch the wind through the windows and the rain and hope for the best.

No one wants to much leave their houses now. We are a nation of post-traumatic victims—from the covid, from the inflation, from the heavy-handed censorship, from the blatant corruption, from the deliberate divisiveness, from witnessing the violence and duplicity and righteous judgments of others. The protests. The growing crime. The closing down of familiar stores and restaurants. The broken. The tent cities proliferating. And the anger and punitive and defensive stances from people we had not expected would be this way. We prefer now to stay with the familiar. We want to watch the rain from the windows.

At the moment, federal government workers are rebelling at having to leave their homes and go into the office to work for three days of each week. They don’t think they need to. And with the price of gas. The hassle of it all too. But it is more than that. It is the weariness of political correctness and the need to socialize and nobody really wants to do that anymore. Much. It takes too much energy and time and wariness. I don’t know what changed. I remember loving going to work. These were my comrades at arms, friends and sometimes surrogate family. We loved working together.

But that changed. I don’t know when. When technology took us out of the present and into an alternative. Some like it that way. Most know no differently now. But if you look at the research it is clear: technology has hurt humanity at the social level. And the solution by the idiots in charge is more technology. The hair of the dog that bit you is still hair and its a scratchy difficult thing to swallow at the best of times. It is simply an exercise in different styles of damage. Damage is a given.

Technology was going to make our world so much better. And for who? Not for the child in the slums of Mumbai but perhaps for the rich child deemed deserving by virtue of its birth and fine-feathered education. There will be no levelling out of all of this. To think such a thing is simply foolish. To wish for it, perhaps is not foolish but to believe in it is foolish. We know this. We’ve been around for “that” long. We know where that goes. Every. Single. Time. But I suppose we never learn. We never ever learn.

But that is dark and we have had enough of dark. We are at a stage now where anger is probably the healthy response. To all that has been thrown at us. The angry voters. They are here to stay until there is a horrific realization maybe that voting will not change the course of events. It will not stop the wars, the siphoning of savings, the degradation of culture, the divisiveness at the heart of it all. We are the ragged puppets dancing for the puppet masters… played like a musical instrument, reverberating through time—the same notes perhaps on a different scale, perhaps faster, but still the same old tune. It is what discourages us all the most.

The best that we can do is not comply with anything that makes us less than human and that, these days, is quite a lot. Quite a lot indeed. So much in fact that we find ourselves quietly watching the rain from windows. Maybe for a long time. In the meantime, there are still some lily-of-the-valley left. We can put them in a little glass of water by the computer to remind us of that other world beyond the screen and the promise of Summer.

Earworm:

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