The Darkest Days

It’s hard to keep the light on these days, internally as well as externally. Yeah, the economy sucks, and gas is high, and jobs aren’t suddenly paying the worker bees more and the CEOs less. 

Things are hard. 

Inside and out. 

The inside is dealing with the stress of a job you may not like and don’t feel you make enough at. The stress of not being able to go where you like now that the country is more open (for good or ill) because gas is so expensive. The cost of groceries and scarcity in some of them adds to that stress. 

You turn on the television and it’s screaming, and war, and killing. 

I get it. 

I get the need to tune out. 

To turn off. 

To jump on TikTok and Instagram and just watch silly videos. 

To get on YouTube and watch people doing fun things. 

We need an escape. 

I get it. 

Boy, do I get it. 

We have been living under what feels like a 100 ton cloud for, how long is it now? Before the 2016 election?

Maybe?

Or was it then. 

Covid hit and landed on everyone in different ways, depending on your health and beliefs. 

Then it was the social upheaval and protests. 

Then the election cycle renewed. 

The insurrection. 

Now school shootings and a war that threatens to engulf the world. 

It’s a LOT. 

Like trying to open your mouth and swallow the ocean. 

We need to tune out sometimes and decompress. 

We need to push away from the table when we are ‘full’ and cannot take any more. 

If we are seeing anything these days it’s that the most of us aren’t OK. 

We are struggling. 

We are struggling and then struggling to hide that we are struggling.

We aren’t in a society that seems to want to accept that we’re not always doing our best and that we sometimes need help. We are obsessed with this weird notion of miraculous success without the aid of anyone else but yourself. 

This weird, macho I Will Do It Alone ideal that very, very few can manage in a world as connected as ours is. 

We all need help. 

We all need friends. 

We all need someone to believe in us. 

And sometimes we all need a shoulder or an umbrella when things get their hardest. 

The thing is though that we can’t look away. 

Not completely.
We have to keep watching as horror after horror comes. 

These are dark, dark days but we need to witness them because we need to understand and appreciate that we are destroying the planet our children and perhaps their children need to live on. 

We have become so self obsessed and focused that we forget that, oh yeah, we’re borrowing this planet and its resources. We don’t get to just use it up and waste it. 

We don’t have that right, despite what some may believe in their twisted minds. 

We need to work to start preserving this planet and, honestly, to better our society. Enough with this nonsense and fear of anyone and anything that is ‘different’ than some made up norm that never existed in the first place. 

The ‘norm’ was made up by White men to make themselves feel superior and ‘right’. It was steeped in a sexist view of Christian religion and a notion that White made right. 

It’s a joke. 

If we all knew what we did when alone, or in the bedroom, well, the norm wouldn’t look so boring, would it?

There is nothing that this world hasn’t seen from us humans. 

We just like to get outraged and upset and clutch our pearls when something doesn’t fit in the small box we want everything to stay in. 

The world is smaller. 

We can finally connect with people around the globe in moments and see the world through their eyes. 

We can connect in ways we never could before. 

We can support one another emotionally and financially.
We can see that we are all a lot more alike than we are different. 

But we have to keep our eyes open. 

The hard part though is tempering the anger. 

The seething rage when we see the injustice, the abuses of power, and the lies, lies, lies. 

I turn on the television and hear how the January 6th insurrection was a ‘dust-up’, or no big deal, just some people showing their love of America. I see it and am enraged because I SAW this happen live and have seen it over and over again and have heard what these people wanted to do. 

Some say – well, how is it different than what happened in the streets with the protesters – deciding that making it a racist issue is the best path for them. Not seeing that January 6th was predicated by a lie and a refusal to accept the results of a legal election. The protests were about needing to stand up against widespread injustice. There are ALWAYS idiots who want to get violent or burn the world down, always, and they just need a reason. Those people are the ones that infiltrate protests and turn them into riots. The people who just want to stab blindly at the Man and the System and anything they can. 

It’s not what happened 1.6 though, by half. 

But it’s hard to hear the lies, to hear the self-righteousness, and the abuse of Christianity in order to take rights away from someone or keep them ignorant. 

But I will not close my eyes to this world. 

I can’t because if I do then the people doing these things, lying, stealing, killing, and destroying this world, will be able to do whatever they please in the dark. 

If we look away then there is no one to stand against them. 

We can find a middle ground, disagreeing on issues but not threatening or harming one another, but we have to stop the people stirring up the unrest. 

People who want chaos and disorder for their own gains and profits without even fully understanding the monster they are creating. 

I won’t look away, but I will close my eyes to take a breath. 

I have to, to be able to keep looking. 

And if enough of us stop looking, if enough of us look away and ignore the struggle and strife in the world then we’re another step closer to zealots, trolls, and killers taking over this country and the world. 

We’re another step closer to burning this planet to ash before our children can even have a chance. 

We are losing ourselves, content in our ignorance and pacified by the comfortable lies that tells us that we’re White and we’re Right and that the Left, well, they’re all violent outsiders that have what we want and will do whatever it takes to have it. There’s difference in views, there’s difference in politics, and then there is just bugnuts insanity and that’s what those notions are. People doing mental contortionism to WhatAbout everything they don’t want to acknowledge, making up stories like fairy tales to lull their worried minds to sleep. Fabricating boogeymen so they have something to aim for.

This is the world when we close our eyes.

But we can’t.

Not anymore.

And I won’t.

I will keep looking because I have no choice. 

…c…

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