There is a strange grief that accompanies watching your country succumb to its demons from a distance. It cannot be shared, set aside or forgotten. It never fully coalesces into visible alarm.
Instead it presses down—on your hands as you buy bread, and on your lungs as you discuss mundanities. It colours your dreams. Sleep becomes thin. This grief possesses its own gravity.
My heart is broken ... not because I did not believe this wolf existed, but because I had hoped, armed with our many proofs of history, that we would not so readily, so gleefully, feed it.
I used to joke that if I could convey something to a future people about this moment now, it would be "It isn't what it looks like." But it is, isn't it? We are breaking ourselves in half over pigment, tribal claims and delusions of supremacy. We have unbridled our monsters.
It is important to fight. We have never had a choice. The call to arms beckoned at every right lost and every innocent person felled, sullied and undefended. We should have been more vigilant, should have recognised that freedoms are not abstractions but progressive, tangible conditions that must be guarded.
So we will fight, and now we will bleed, and certain alternate futures—once very close—will slide again out of reach, because that is what it costs to wait.
But, because I am tired and there is so much noise, I wanted to grieve. Just here, for a minute.
Instead it presses down—on your hands as you buy bread, and on your lungs as you discuss mundanities. It colours your dreams. Sleep becomes thin. This grief possesses its own gravity.
My heart is broken ... not because I did not believe this wolf existed, but because I had hoped, armed with our many proofs of history, that we would not so readily, so gleefully, feed it.
I used to joke that if I could convey something to a future people about this moment now, it would be "It isn't what it looks like." But it is, isn't it? We are breaking ourselves in half over pigment, tribal claims and delusions of supremacy. We have unbridled our monsters.
It is important to fight. We have never had a choice. The call to arms beckoned at every right lost and every innocent person felled, sullied and undefended. We should have been more vigilant, should have recognised that freedoms are not abstractions but progressive, tangible conditions that must be guarded.
So we will fight, and now we will bleed, and certain alternate futures—once very close—will slide again out of reach, because that is what it costs to wait.
But, because I am tired and there is so much noise, I wanted to grieve. Just here, for a minute.
