A gorgeous, washed, clear morning, cool breezes through the window. I heard the thunder yesterday and the rain drumming the roof but I was lying in a darkened room on my acupuncturist’s table so I missed the tornado warning and the sirens.
The doom-sayers vie for attention on social media this morning, failing to recognize how much they betray about their own privilege. Many, many people in this country don’t have the luxury of predicting doom. “Someone on Threads” (I need to come up with a name for this composite person because I am always quoting them) said that Americans have co-opted everything they can from Black people, except resistance. We white people are going to have to learn pretty quick.
What is it like to live in an occupied country? I’m a beginner, but so far it doesn’t happen like in books that have a high-energy plot that never lets up so the reader will keep turning pages. It’s more surreal—ordinary life interspersed with bursts of horror. “I never thought it would come to this,” or “I can’t believe this is happening here,” or (the worst) “this is not who we are.”
But it is who we are, it is who we have always been, just some of us were shielded by various apparently random circumstances, and we are out of milk and maybe I should buy extra dried beans.
Ursula le Guin saw it in 2014:
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.
Photo on the incomparable Finger Lakes Weather