Onslaught.
The campaign to enact into law the cackling, cloven-hoofed beast that is the GOP “health care” agenda feels reminiscent to me of the drive to invade Iraq in 2003, primed to leave thousands of people dead or suffering for no good reason while enriching the bank accounts of a select few.
And I remember the anger in the streets being dismissed as the sound of a “focus group” and I remember how experts in the field were dismissed as partisan flack and I remember how despite every indication that such a slipshod, pencil-sketched strategy would lead to calamity the scoundrels went ahead and pulled the trigger anyway.
It has been a concentrated few weeks in which we witness unarmed people shot by police with consequences that fail to match the crime, in which a celebrity’s high-profile rape trial remains undecided despite overwhelming patterns of evidence covering several years and several victims, in which major journalistic entities scold minority communities for taking issue with the work of a single arts critic. The drumbeat is constant, unrelenting, and clear:
“We are institutional power.”
“We do not hear you.”
“We will do as we see fit.”
There is only so much sharply garbed inhumanity I can swallow before the despair starts to feel like the whole of my being. On my brightest days the best I have to offer are creativity, empathy, a discerning eye, a collaborative spirit; these feel increasingly valueless in a society where the wilderness is creeping back into our beings, where we become defined more aptly by our ruthlessness than by our compassion.
I do not know, friends.
I wish I did, but I don’t.
Creative Control 