21

Building bridges to nowhere?

Sylvia Shawcross

There was a wild wind and a wicked sky and a cold cold day. North of here the power went out for a long long time and people grumbled but were secretly grateful for an excuse to do nothing. And then it was back to warm weather expecting rain. But it was a long enough cold to freeze the puddles on the ground and catch ice in unexpected places. The crows slid in a playful flood of black feathers on the snow-ice by the ravine in their quest for scraps thrown there and the raccoons stayed in their dens. It was an unexpected day as far as unexpected can be in these days of predictive unexpectedness.

Some of us of course checked the weather networks to see what was coming but fewer do that these days. Weather reports now are too much full of conspicuous adjectives to startle you into a green panic over the state of the world and we grow tired of the drama. In the old days we’d say it was a funny day and then carry on doing whatever it was we did without a bit of consternation.

We will adapt. We always have. At the end of the day, what are you going to do about it anyway? But a cold day without power is time for tea and reading and pensiveness. A comfort kind of day. Those are the best. Particularly if the book is good.

Unfortunately I was trying to read C.J. Hopkin’s Rise of the New Normal Reich. It did not go well. It hasn’t gone well every time. The book apparently is excellent but it just terrifies me and I can’t read it beyond a few paragraphs at a time. I feel obligated to read this book because I know the price being paid by the author and that tells us more than probably the book could ever tell us.

Just like the covid pandemic, it is the reaction that terrifies. For Hopkins it is the summonings by the powers-that-be, the judicial legal terrorism on a person with an opinion. The return of book burnings… One step away we are. One little step. Although some would say we’re already there.

And knowing all this it feels like a kind of betrayal to be having such a difficult time reading this. It is Hopkin’s usual brilliance. I feel like I have to personally apologize to him for being so cowardly about reading it. What if what they say this book is about is true? And do I want to know? I’ve reached that stage. The Do I Want To Know stage of it all. Somewhat like checking on the weather. We just don’t want to know. For now. At least for now. Just let it all happen and carry on.

But that won’t do of course. Not for fools like us. Whether we were born fools or became fools it doesn’t much matter anymore. If we are the fools or the prophets, we can’t even know. With our horses all saddled up and frantically holding on to the reins we tilt at windmills perhaps or maybe we are not tilting at all. Maybe we are making a difference. We don’t much know.

For now the best that we can do is specialize in our horror. And if reading Hopkin’s is a problem for me, finding my specialty in the horror is even worse. I zip-line through headlines and stories and news events like a firefly on amphetamines, ablaze unpredictably with righteous rage and deadening sadness and routinely flabberghasted but still flying. Corruption? War? Freedom of speech? AI? Inflation? Which one indeed.

I’ve quite given up trying to find the positive in any of this—Climate change e.g. could make Canada the world’s bread basket or won’t it be nice to see India as the world’s new superpower after all they’ve been through. Or something equally trite and positive, those two words being synonymous these days. In many ways you can only be one or the other—frantically flying or brightly ridiculous. The two narratives. Only the two. There are no others. So they say. In between you are a target or you are lost. Make your stand. Pick your side. Sitting on the fence only gives you a sore bum. Bastards judging. Always pushing. Are you with us or against us? Hell if I know. I don’t want to know. I’ve explained that already.

But I can say there is one thing that bothers me and that I want to know the answer to. I am uncertain on what to think.

It is the vindictive glee. I do not like vindictive glee. (I do not like green eggs and ham either but that is neither here nor there except to remind me of book burnings and how sad I feel about the attack on Dr. Seuss.) I want to understand whether it is fair to condemn such ugliness? This “see—I gotcha!” thing out there now with so many of the so-called conspiracy theories proving true and parliamentarians leaping nastily on each other and pundits red smug with spiteful delight. The finally vindicated being vindictive.

My instinct is to condemn it because how can it be that anyone can take pleasure in another’s pain or shame even if they’ve done such damage to us all? But mostly there is the fear that lingers with that forgiving approach: the fear that those at least motivated to change the world with vengeance on their perceived enemies will give up. Even if they are ugly in their attack, at least they are doing something which motivated if only by their anger might change the direction of all of this nonsense. Because it is nasty nonsense now and directions must change. We are flailing in hell. Only the brave-hearted and persistent and single-minded will find their way through it all.

So if it is vindictiveness that makes you fight for peace, then who is anyone to condemn? Doesn’t the ends justify the means in this case?

But isn’t that what the bad guys are doing? My way or the highway. Come hell or high water the Agenda must go on. Despite the legal suits. Despite the farmers and the truckers protests. Despite elections. Despite the suffering and pain of the mooing herds. Despite the truth leaking out like sour whiskey from a broken bottle. We then become them. And was that the only way? I do not know.

For if all these peaceful means do not sway the Agenda, then what is next?

And for some it does not matter who is winning, as long as there is the divisiveness. It is that which we had facing us mooing herds to overcome. It was not the enemy so much. Is it even possible to find a bridge to each other anymore? In this world? I do not know. I only know that it is our only hope. For peace at least. Peace amidst the ruins is better than war in utopia. Somebody else’s idea of utopia anyway because one person’s utopia is another person’s ruins. We should already know that by now.

But this is as dark a topic as can be on which many things can be said and outside the warmth creeps on tender toes in the snow and promises us Spring. On that we can take hope.

Peace. Here. Now.

…and of course the earworm:

Syvlia Shawcross is a writer based in Canada. You can read more of her work on her SubStack.

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Michael
Michael
Mar 10, 2024 5:05 PM

‘Weather reports now are too much full of conspicuous adjectives to startle you into a green panic over the state of the world and we grow tired of the drama.’
Of course, to keep the populace alarmed is the aim here. By imaginary hobgoblins, as HL Mencken put it. The solution to this mortal danger always provided by the authorities peddling the alarming stories, according to the old problem-reaction-solution paradigm.

‘And if reading Hopkin’s is a problem for me, finding my specialty in the horror is even worse.’
Finding this specialty might be a tad counterproductive. An overall idea of what is happening is more useful than diving deep one particular rabbit hole. And if you think Hopkins (whom I like) is hard, try Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn for a good description of what humanity is capable of. Some practical experience helps to understand their writing and I doubt most people in the urbanised West have it, being spared for decades the horror being exported elsewhere in the world. Now it’s come here and it finds people soft and unprepared.

‘Peace. Here. Now.’ It looked like ‘peace’ for a while, but only because we were too polite to openly discuss supposedly controversial ideas. And then we discovered how much we drifted apart and how our neighbours and families switched to full blown authoritarian onslaught to herd everyone in their particular utopia. That was quite the illusory peace. I don’t think we should want for the same kind of ‘peace’ after this little war.

Owen
Owen
Mar 6, 2024 10:25 PM

Sylvia, I wanted to just post a kiss as in “X” but it threw an error “Input too short” – imagine! Ha. X

Howard
Howard
Mar 4, 2024 4:22 PM

Vindictiveness is one of life’s major virtues…compared to smugness. There is absolutely nothing more disgustingly vile than smugness. If you doubt that, pay a visit to Glen Beck’s Blaze TV and watch his tiny fat mouth purse up into the most smug aspect any human has ever effected. As if Beck has anything to be smug about!

There’s a little smugness in James Corbett too, I’m sorry to say – especially when he’s dissing the climate crisis.

Oh what I wouldn’t give to exchange these souls’ smugness for a little “Those G.D. Moth**F***ers!” Yet polite company eschews free speech in favor of smugness.

I say “F**k polite company!”

Hemlockfen
Hemlockfen
Mar 4, 2024 2:43 PM

Kids and I were going back and forth texting about the early spring weather.

It was 70 there and 60 here. The early warm weather was welcome.

Chipmunks are out. Owls are calling. Sandhill cranes are already clucking in the distance. A hungry goshawk was hunting my dog.

And the deer ticks. They don’t sleep. I read that a new Lyme Disease vaccine is in the works for people. mRNA?

The familiar spring call of the chickadee is still non existent. Frogs are quiet too. It won’t be long before the black bears come out of hibernation and start destroying bird feeders. Better get them in before it’s too late.

You have to be a nutcase to not like an early spring.

The twenty foot high walls of plowed snow lining the roadways are non existent. The ice is out on the lakes and was never thick enough for ice shanties. Diehard perch fishermen (and women) had to resort to boats this year.

Snow plow drivers are now broke. But the county and state will figure out a way of wasting the money they budgeted for overtime pay, salt, sand and fuel.

And the glee in the voices of climate screamers. Gore and Kerry are, most assuredly, prepping climate change news releases of, “see, I told you so”.

Fuck those dumb asses.

Someone please explain to the Chicken Little duo that 2 mile high glaciers once sat where the Great Lakes now sit and started melting long before people started using fossil fuels.

Johnny
Johnny
Mar 4, 2024 6:26 AM

No more sidelines:

tonyopmoc
tonyopmoc
Mar 4, 2024 3:10 AM

Whilst I had lost my job,I still had a car….so I told both my now Ex-Girlfriends who had thrown me away (no job no prospects)….and I told my Mum and My Two Brothers and Two Sisters…In fact I told Everyone…I was just so happy..

I have a New Girlfriend.

Erik Nielsen
Erik Nielsen
Mar 5, 2024 10:11 PM
Reply to  tonyopmoc

So you got a new girlfriend because had a car, and told everyone you were so happy because you had a car and therefore could get a new girlfriend.
Is that a correct interpretation?.

wally jasper
wally jasper
Mar 4, 2024 1:34 AM

The Earworm…..
Art Garfunkel. OMG. What a sublime angelic voice. So beautiful.

niko
niko
Mar 4, 2024 12:54 AM

I’m not inclined to I-told-you-so morality or politically correct ethics looking for cases and classes of people to make examples of. Sure seems a waste of seeking alternatives to the usual vindictiveness of norms, old or new, imposed by powers that (shouldn’t) be for whenever we step out of line. How many imitate its example in habits of hatred, fear, and obedience is hard to say. Maybe we can still surprise ourselves. 

It can be understandable to curse whoever collaborates with crime against humanity when on the receiving end of its rule of law and order. Yet crying for blood of others who’ve simply been taken in and victimized by any of the many illusions and lies which makes liberation a work in progress for any of us suggests the kind of divisiveness that undermines solidarity to build solid movements among the masses of us who suffer and struggle in different ways. Maybe what’s needed are empathic, mutually supportive means to find our ways to liberation in communal and social relations which create new ways of living and learning among one another.

I don’t see equivalence between the institutionalized violence of ruling powers and what rises from the resulting destructiveness among the abused. Those who declare the wars and those who (are made to) fight them is anything but equivalent, for instance. That’s all the more driven home with a vengeance by those who profit off exploited labor soldiering ‘ultimate sacrifice’ to bloodthirsty gods on high, vindicating their rule by monopoly of violence that backs up the systemic sacrifice of bodies and souls to business as usual.

If anything, our attention should be on self-defense, and the best means to fight back in war always already waged on humanity from earliest civilization’s enforcement of class rule. There simply are nonnegotiable values and inevitable sides we must choose to take if we’re going to make real differences to the death march which keeps progressing by our consent and complicity. That the kind of revolutionary resistance needed to confront if not overcome the New (ab)Normal appears largely absent from where I’m looking is why I’m now able to read only so much of its criticism before I’m reminded how little is being done amid all that’s being said.  

Johnny
Johnny
Mar 3, 2024 11:02 PM

‘Own nothing and be happy’
In plain English:
Owe everyone and take your soma (drink, drugs, pills, toys, screen time) and be anesthetized.

mgeo
mgeo
Mar 4, 2024 4:47 AM
Reply to  Johnny

Too optimistic. What the psychos have planned for us Morlocks is that we will have to justify our existence, or undergo early conversion to Soylent Green.

ariel
ariel
Mar 3, 2024 10:37 PM

Yeah Sylvia, we are not quite there yet. Not that this is precisely OK. because it isn’t. I keep pointing out that this is both an individual and to some extent a sort of collective spiritual test. The latter of which ‘we’ have so far clearly failed. The ‘cure’ is DEFINITELY WORSE than the disease.
‘Individually’ that’s a different story, the legendary ‘other kettle of fish.’ You see, the ‘crooked establishment’ and it’s flunkies and enforcers do not make the rules , spiritually speaking. And they, to a large extent are subservient to these rules, which is why they carefully tell us what they are going to do, well in advance. Because they have to. If this thing about ‘intervention,’ divine or otherwise’ were not true I would have definitely drowned at Point Leo in the State of Victoria January 77, but instead I was plucked somehow out of the Pacific and placed on the beach after having lost consciousness through total exhaustion while being carried out towards Tasmania by a riptide.
I know at least three people whom the Pacific has claimed as her own.
Anything can happen, here on in. I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets a bit biblical, or if Antonin Artaud has a hand in the script.
Apropos, we all love your work, and the caring that comes through it.
Yes, the spring has sprung, here in rural Wales. Snowdrops, crocuses, and daffodils.

mgeo
mgeo
Mar 4, 2024 4:50 AM
Reply to  ariel

An ex-PM also got lost, presumably “claimed by the Pacific”.

Johnny
Johnny
Mar 4, 2024 5:57 AM
Reply to  mgeo

Harold Holt disappeared in the cold waters of Bass Strait.

Ricardo Carvalho
Ricardo Carvalho
Mar 3, 2024 10:00 PM

Reading your thoughts, dear Sylvia, its the freshest water on the clearest montain view.
Bilding bridges might be our greatest task at this moment.
Peace here now!

Erik Nielsen
Erik Nielsen
Mar 3, 2024 8:04 PM

Jesus Christ said the same, fully justified but easier said than done.

We can forgive, but there is a point where its waste of time because the person or group have become addicts. They cannot get out of their addiction without a cold turker.

But we can do something about the glee. We can tell CJH as you do, avoid glee and write neutrally to our human instincts.

Jos
Jos
Mar 3, 2024 2:18 PM

So brilliant- so much that rings true for me but so much better written than I could ever manage. The ‘Do I want to know?’ thought hit me quite recently. The answer is mostly ‘No’.

Clutching at straws
Clutching at straws
Mar 3, 2024 11:46 AM

I like Jesus.

Well, I like most of his teachings.

The problem with turning the other cheek is you get hit twice.

lalaland
lalaland
Mar 3, 2024 2:40 PM

interesting little thought on that verse…

At the time of Jesus, says Wink, striking backhand a person deemed to be of lower socioeconomic class was a means of asserting authority and dominance. If the persecuted person “turned the other cheek,” the discipliner was faced with a dilemma: The left hand was used for unclean purposes, so a back-hand strike on the opposite cheek would not be performed. An alternative would be a slap with the open hand as a challenge or to punch the person, but this was seen as a statement of equality. Thus, by turning the other cheek, the persecuted was demanding equality.

Michael
Michael
Mar 10, 2024 3:01 PM
Reply to  lalaland

I love these pearls of historical knowledge and the shift in meaning they imply. Here we are, arguing over metaphysics, only to find out that this was very practical advice at the time, very much in line with a cultural context we are oblivious to.
But even in a general sense, I always took it that if you follow this advice blindly – like good Christian sheep – you get slapped twice or worse. It requires discernment from the one being hit to figure out if the aggressor is on the verge of waking up from his (her) rage, or this will only end up in a thorough beating. In other words, some personal responsibility to perceive and to judge the situation is required. Stuff most people don’t want to deal with.

Howard
Howard
Mar 5, 2024 3:31 PM

Maybe there is a solution. At least in fantasy. And haven’t the world’s “leaders” made it clear the world reeks of fantasy.