It wasn’t the first time. Not the first time that I’d come an inch closer to understanding the idea that the adults were leaving this responsibility to us.
Maybe the first time was in 4th grade, when I realized grown-ups in big companies were killing the earth and its inhabitants by refusing to stop producing plastic products. And refusing to even try recycling. And refusing to talk or even think about the fact that they were leaving a crumbling planet in the tiny hands of their future grandchildren who had no part in making the mess in the first place.
I can’t be sure.
Maybe it was when I saw that people with lots of money and food to spare weren’t donating it to people in need. When I learned about people in low-income countries and the trials they suffer. When I learned that there were kids who didn’t get childhoods romping around in the woods, making fairy houses and forts like me, and that adults said there was no “easy answer” to this problem.
Who the hell’s job is it to fix all this anyway?
But this time, this time I realized that the problems that needed fixing were not so far off as a white saviorist trip across the Atlantic to Africa, or as distant as the Pacific Garbage Patch— they were right under my nose and I hadn’t even noticed.
I thought that the videos of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. protests were in black and white for a reason. That the crunching static overlaying his cadence was there because he’d had a dream so long ago that he might as well have been a founding father. And never in my imagination was there room for injustices like redlining or racial targeting, and I couldn't imagine a reason for nationwide protests in the States, because we had fixed all of the stuff we were angry about after the Tea Party and the Civil War.
But no. MLK would be 92 if he weren’t assassinated, not much older than many of our grandparents.
My grandma was born in the 40s, and when she went to college, her family was surprised, maybe even a bit perturbed, that she had a Black roommate.
Ruby Bridges, the first child to go to an integrated school in the South, is 66 now. She has an Instagram.
What I thought was “history” has stretched, reached out from the textbooks and grasped our lives in its clutches without my even blinking an eye. And we still haven’t won the fight for civil rights.
So this time, when I realized that the grown-ups and my country had dropped this lead-weight responsibility to us kids, I realized my true privileges. The privileges of ignorance, of disengagement, of being “not political,” hit me like a wave of dread. The dark tsunami of What if I have better informed thoughts than the people I admired growing up? smashed my consciousness. How could I, decades younger than these people I used to look up to, be outpacing them in understanding the reality of how screwed up our country is? I stood there, drenched and chilled to the bone. Fuck.
What are we going to do now? How can we clean up the radioactive wreckage from hundreds of years of colonialism, white supremacy, late-stage capitalism, etc., before the list of names, the casualties, is longer than we can hope to recount?
Welcome to what I call “cynical optimism,” a new term I coined to describe the the wonderful mix of existential dread caused by the innumerable fires of injustice that we try to put out so we can finally live in a world of equity and the belief that they may one day be extinguished. I’m so glad you’re here!
I’m so glad you’re here because it’s the people in the movement that truly make the optimism in the “cynical optimism” more than just a word— my book group, my community, my friends and family all struggling to do their part in this together.
Yeah, it stinks worse than a rotten can of trash you should’ve taken to the road a week ago that this is the way it is, but it’s up to us now. So, what role will you play?
Comentários