Dear America:
Hai! I’m your conscience. We haven’t spoken in a while.
I should clarify. We’ve talked, Lord knows you all have, and liked, shared and remarked on the remarks and memes and news content of others. Some of you produce news content on your own account and some of that copy is quite good.
“Whose work is he talking about? “ You ask.
Ask yourself! You know you’re fighting the good fight, with the tools you’ve been given to fight it.
Isn’t that the common thread through the din of it all, all these myriad good fights and whatnot?
There’s a good fight and it’s necessary, because something has gone terribly wrong.
“Just look at 2016! What could be worse?”
2017…
“Worse than that?”
2018 starts Monday…?
Here we are, in Year Zero of the Month of Trumpidor, hoping we make it through the killin’ it on Twitter fields...and for some inexplicable reason we keep turning around and wading right back into the WTF paddies,
We’re drowning in noise and we just can’t get enough of it to drink at the same time.
WTF, indeed.
The noise of it all’s become like water to us: It’s killing us and sustaining us at the same time.
“You call that living?”. Meryl Streep doesn’t say that, I don’t think, in any of her avatars from Angels in America but I can hear her saying it, so let’s pretend she just did.
Living on noise. It didn’t start yesterday. It didn’t start with a fateful glide down a gilded escalator oh so few months ago.
Something went terribly wrong with the noise level long, long ago.
With that realization, let me amend my salutation.
Dear America:
Hai! I’m your conscience. We’ve spoken lots. We never stopped. We just got really good at tuning out the sound of approaching disaster.
Oh, what’s that in the background? Burbling water? Oh, that’s….that’s nice. Rising tides lift all boats, you know.
Except this wasn’t a rising tide, rather a tsunami of history, its urgency measured not in minutes but in months, not in days but in decades.
Floods bear up plenty, but not boats: Try wreckage, and of course bodies.
When we see the ruin isn’t when the flood began. By that time, the rain stopped, the waters are receding and it’s safe enough to inch back home and see what, if anything, remains of where we were the day or the week, or the decade before, when, oh, look, clouds on the horizon.
Heh, thunder! Look there! Lightning strikes in the hills. Hasn’t rained in a while, might do this dry country good, right? Yeah, thanks for agreeing with me.
Except dry ground is often hard ground, with dead vegetation, with little ability to absorb runoff.
All that nice-seeming rain in the distance flows, really quickly, to the lowest available elevation, rises up here and there, overcomes or disintegrates obstructions to its force, then continues further on.
Eventually it arrives at the sea.
One supposes the odd molecule of that flood run-off winds up in time in the Marianas Trench in the Pacific, as low as it’s possible for earthly water to go.
Except some geology genius out there is coughing into their fist. “Well, you surely know, Mr. Kendrick, that there are these things call underground aquifers...”
And...just like that I got tuned out. Yet I digress.
(Regressing.) So (claps hands together) water’s good, right? We need water!
(Pause)
Uh...what’s water thing about again?
Fine.
Once, more through the reset breach, dear friends!
Dear America:
Hai! I’m your conscience. Stop treating the flood as if it’s coming, or happening right now.
You saw this coming all your lives. Your parents saw this coming all their lives.
Why did you insist on standing in the path of the flash flood? For the thrill of it?
There were people warning you: Get. Out of. The Gulch. Right. Now. Why didn’t you move?
Some people listened to their conscience: They started to get to high ground.
Why did you yank some back, and jeer those who got clear of you?
This is probably the saddest part of all. You who lost everything, or someone you loved.
Why did you blame, first and worst, the people who told you: Dudes, no, that’s low ground don’t *stand* there it will be bad?
“What’s this parable thing about?”
“I dunno, I’ve been looking up Corgi pup pictures.”
“OMG have you seen ‘The Crown’?”
“OMG those dogs! They named them after drinks!”
(Sigh) I suppose I better get on with it.
I could be talking about climate change, class war, racism or the latest Postal Service pontifications of President Plump.
I could be talking about GOTV, or party (re)organization, or anything at all.
Heck, I could be talking about “Delete My Latest [bleeping] Star Wars Movie, Kos!”
It’s become easy to tune out The Dress Was Blue/Damn Your Mutant Eyes The Dress Was Gold wars.
And once you can do that, tuning out the sound of floodwaters on the minor issues of the day like nuclear proliferation, migrant amnesty, marriage equality and – this seems to be on the table lately – the concept of equality under law in general.
“OMG check out this Corgi here… what a cute sploot!”
Yeah, those waves on the tidal bore now seem to bore us, too.
“All this political stuff. I just don’t do political anymore. It’s cost me enough friends and family relations already.”
Fair enough, but you know who all that political stuff doesn’t bore? People who want self-interested outcomes out of those discussions….at best.
Oh, there are involved people who want the greater good, too, but the bad ones tend to outweigh them when the greater part of the commonwealth finds corgi pup pictures more compelling than establishing that, as common ground, it would be a really good idea not to retweet the ruminations of out and about, loud and proud, [bleeping] fascists.
But as only the involved people are involved, the self-interested (and people who for whatever reason just want to hurt others, for hurting others’ sake) presently have the most air time and like things that way...until they can make them even worse.
Why do they want to do such harm? Such persons aren’t looking to dominate civil discourse — they want it ended. Discourse does not interest them. They’re intent on flooding the commons with their noise, their noise only.
And it’s become all too easy to shut out the din, sometimes with earbuds, sometimes with noise of our own…sometimes by just sighing (I do that) and saying nothing.
For it seems sometimes the only silence we have is our own...except it’s not that quiet either.
Others cope — I did for a long time — by making noise of our own, but that gets wearisome. Ultimately, you end up with a few, just a megaphone-wielding few, you know, the odd media mega-conglomerate or two, who are happy to get their messages out, and only theirs.
Somehow, keeping silent didn’t produce much silence after all.
And God in Heaven, we need that as much as water. The absence of quiet is like the absence of air itself.
We are not just drowning in noise. We are asphyxiating in it.
Nothing but…noise.
So much noise, there’s not a moment of silence to be had.
And when there’s no silence at all… you can’t hear the floodwaters coming at all.
But...wait
What’s that?
Dear America:
Hai! I’m your conscience.
(pause)
(more pausing)
…
…
(not yet)
…
That last few moments.
Wasn’t it nice? : )
