I’ve found comfort the last 10 years in looking back at historical comparisons of the last few hundred years in our history. The liklihood that I’ll survive a prolonged disruption of supply chains and civil unrest is of course quite low (I’m dead in 48 hours without meds) but knowing humans just… Become seething, mad monsters, for some reason, in cycles, produces a ritual-like soothing effect in me, like watching the passage of the seasons. Humans are emergent systems. When we get ourselves riled up in a collective movement, everything we know about individual behavior is useful. We become something else.
I was, of course, TRAINED for this by generation of people who remembered it. I think a lot about that too. About how splintering up generations instead of living together and learning from them has left a big knowledge hole. I go back and forth wondering if it’s better or worse my grandma is dead.
But her sharing her experiences under the boot in France were valuable to me, and got me reading about it elsewhere, and allowed me to have my mental breakdown much earlier in this process because I saw the reality immediately, so now that we’re here I know what is here and I accept that it’s here.
I’ve already done that emotional work, and lost years of my life to rolling around coming to grips with the reality of where exactly I was in history. That’s not to say I didn’t have hope this year! I did! Life is chaos! We could have gone full FDR. But I was fully prepared for how wind was blowing. Even a win meant just papering bandaids over wound getting larger and larger.
I compared last 10 years to being Hodor at the door, just being crushed by weight of the mad army while horrors slipped through. Now door is open. And honestly? It was almost a relief. Because I could stop worrying about it and papering over it and just turn and face it. This is the current world.
The truth is, my grandma got up every day in Vichy France and stood in rationing lines. She found a Nazi boot with a foot still in it by the river and threw it back in because if SS found it, they’d shoot 10 people. My great-grandfather was disappeared for months by the SS and came back broken.
She would often show us the scar on her head from when an Allied and Nazi plane were shooting above her and a bullet grazed her temple and landed in the shed behind her. She kept the bullet! It was chaos and near misses and misery and death and you survived on luck. But you got up every day.
*You got up every day.* Because truth is – no matter what anyone tells you – no one has any idea what’s going to happen or who is going to make it or what world will look like in 30 years. And in meantime, all you have NOW is this one great and glorious life. You get to decide how to spend this time.
I’m focusing on what I can control. I’m painting. Planning a garden. Working on a new book. Because truth is I don’t know when or if a bullet is going to hit me or just graze my head and if I survive to 86 – which historically will be other side of this – I’ll resent not spending my time now well.
There is lot of despair out there, and I get it, because that’s why I was drunk for 3 months after 2016 election. It’s why I kept sinking until 2022, when I finally realized it WAS entirely possible I’d be my grandma and SURVIVE this shitty period in history and if so, what would I have to show?
Worlds are ending all the time. It sucks that ours is. I am the guy at the end of Babel who leaves before London Bridge. London Bridge was my line too far, because I could not bear the human cost of revolution and regime change. But sometimes it all has to burn down before anything new can grow.
When Europe literally destroyed itself, they made new world from those ashes. Whatever comes out of what we’re about to go through is something I may never live to see, but historically – and I cling to this – historically, whatever comes out other side will be better than what we went into it with.
We are on a rickety boat in a vast and tumultuous sea of mad humans at a turning point in history. We are in it together. While we may not know where we’re going or how the wind swings next, until it takes us down or spits us out, our time is ours. That’s all that we have.
I will spend it joyfully.
