E.P. Philadelphia, United States
How does one psychically survive the end of empire? How does one walk among the increasingly impoverished and the ruined, avoiding the falling columns of democracy? How does one deep-listen to citizen consumers who seek business-as-usual ostrich distractions, thinking this the perverse ping pong of powerful political parties? How does one wake up people to historical cycles greater than Wall Street’s up & downs. How does one find & recruit political soulmates to reinvent America?
TD:
Dear E.P.,
You ask difficult questions. Questions that many of us are struggling with. How to move into a future that does not reek of despair? How to imagine organizing ourselves differently because the way we are living now cannot sustain us or the planet. Our much maligned friend the ostrich does not bury its head in the sand. Being flightless, it cannot make its nest in trees, and so must keep its eggs in a hole in the ground, and in order to make sure the eggs are evenly heated, brings its long neck to the ground to rotate them. Perhaps we may take a lesson here. Understand first, the lay of the land, the risks we face, the dangers. Get close to the ground. Look again for the grass, the roots. There lies some hope of reinvention and reimagining. It seems inconceivable to think that as a global community, we have gone through the existential crisis of a pandemic that utterly changed our lives, and instead of emerging from the “portal” as Arundhati Roy suggested, with a chance at reinvention, we have dragged all our old prejudices through with greater gusto. Perhaps there are clues to be found in the past? We are constantly being told a story about the inevitability of capitalism, but human history proves that we have found other ways to organize ourselves, that people have given importance to things other than war and money. We are an experimenting, imaginative, wandering species, but mostly, we are a species that relies on community and communication. Maybe we begin by addressing the gaps?
