Out of the Darkness and Into the Light

Tentative Tenacity for Troubled Times.

Golden Age, Margot Potter Studios, 2024 COPYRIGHT ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Hello, Friend,

It is, yet again, a gloomy, spritzy, grey day here in farm country. This has been, without question, the gloomiest spring of my lifetime. It’s as if the weather decided to mirror the gloom that has descended on the world.

I’m being melodramatic. I am an actor, after all.

Just in time for summer, though, this pattern seems to be lifting and we’re about to head into a hot, sweaty, sunny heat wave. Out of the Poe-niverse into the fire, as one doesn’t say but I just did because it’s my Substack and I’ll write what I want to, write what I want to, write what I want to…

The upside of this cool, wet spring is our gardens are lush and verdant. Even the planters are finally starting to get their groove on here. The field in front of the apartment that was brown and sad after the poop marsh incident was further browned by a deluge of Roundup*. Sigh. Neatly planted rows of Round-up ready corn have begun to appear, which at least offer a bit of green and will soon provide some privacy. No rows of sunflowers this year, but we have some volunteers emerging and that’s something.

I’ll take my pleasures where they grow, even if it isn’t where they were planted.

There were some thoughtful responses to yesterday’s question about what we might do if we were to start over in America with our own Project 2029. Pondering on the idea further it occurred to me how complicated it is to try to wrangle hundreds of millions of people and their hundreds of millions of perspectives and agendas. Humans are complicated creatures and, as I’ve discussed in the past, we’re not even all wired the same way. It feels almost impossible to imagine creating a society in which everyone has equal access and opportunity and we embrace the glorious diversity of being, where happiness matters more than how much money we make, where the way in which you treat others holds more weight than your credit score, where kindness is celebrated and cruelty is rejected, where we value creativity over productivity, where we elevate empowerment over power plays, where we strive for unity and equity over division and exclusion, where we care for the least among us because it is the right thing to do and it makes us a stronger, kinder, more resilient nation. I’m not sure that it is possible, though there are some Scandinavian countries that have gotten closer to it, only to begin to flirt with right wing ideologies as of late.

This toxic tide, this emerging Brave New World, this concerted effort to data-mine and micro-target us with virtual propaganda designed to activate the darkest demons of our primal brain presents an existential challenge.

I have in the past postulated that we’re experiencing the last painful gasp of the patriarchy. We’ve reached the endgame of that paradigm, where else can we go in this linear construct? When a handful of narcissist billionaires hold most of the wealth and are insisting we accept their unfettered AI delusions, thinking themselves gods among mortals. They are willing, even gleefully so, to sacrifice the planet, the future, and the rest of us so they can live in some video game inspired dystopia. We’ve hit an impasse. Where do we go from here? Is there a way out? Can the many come together to defeat the few and build a brighter future? I’m a pragmatic optimist and a hopeful romantic. I recognize the seriousness of this moment, but I do know there are good people with good dreams who aren’t willing to let go of them in obeisance to these cartoon villains playacting at their neo-feudal dark fantasies.

It has been a gloomy, spritzy, grey spring, and a dark and foreboding moment in human history. Yet there are little cracks in the illusions, little bits of joy are peeking through. The truth is coming to light, and that holds promise. We have a long way yet to go, but I have tentative hope, unwavering resolve. In the meantime, let’s keep dreaming up a brighter future, together.

If we’re going down, we might as well go down dreaming big, and if we’re rising up we’ll be ready to do the hard work to make those dreams real.

*We rent here and do not use any chemicals in our yard, but we can’t control what happens on the rest of the farm.

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