Benjamin Burke

I’m struck by the feebleness of things.  Of art—I thought there would be some poem, some song, some film or some sort of sculpture or creation of any sort that might sway the tides of all humanity, part the clouds and reveal the path, change the hearts in the blink of an eye and set us immediately onto a brighter future as we like to say.

It sure sounds stupid when you lay it all out like that.  But after a good time of leaning into a depression, of listening to those whispers and really giving it time to reveal its core—I’ve realized that I’m simply having a hard time adjusting to my new sense of non-idealism, accepting and fully absorbing the idea that it didn’t happen, we’re beyond the point of no return, and if anything of significance were going to happen, I will be long gone before it even begins.

In a nutshell, I’m speaking of climate change.  There I said it. 

But still, you never know what’s around the corner.  What new technology or discovery may uncover a path never before known to exist.  And the idealism takes yet another breath.  But now it makes room on the couch for the other side of the coin, which holds just as much value. Yes we fucked up and we’re continuing to.  The world is so fucked up, so cluttered with mistaken or outright purposely hurtful and deadly systems.  We’re painfully entrenched.  I knew this of course but I didn’t really know it.  That’s what the pandemic fully and finally revealed to me.  It ripped the skin off the world and gave me ample time to just sit there and look at it.  We had no choice.  Glued to the tube to see if there were any new developments today, if we were about to get out of this, never knowing that it was going to be far longer than we could have ever imagined, and all the while you sit there watching injustice parade around in its underwear, pissing in the corners and laughing behind your back.  No now there it is just laughing right there in front of you, right there on the other side of this glass.  Cackling.  Punch the glass all you want.  Go ahead.  Punch the glass.  Punch the glass.  Punch the glass.

They say absurdism is what comes next.  They say that is the only path forward in such a doomed and absurd world.  I suppose they’re right.  Only because nothing else in this closet seems to fit.

This is our cycle throughout time. Right up to the edge of the cliff until the wheels fall off and then we realize perhaps we shouldn’t have been driving in the first place. We would have preferred to walk. While holding hands. Not only would we have seen the cliff long before it was too late—we would have picked a few strawberries in that field back there.

Fortunately, there’s always seeds to be found in your pockets. And the purpose of life has always simply been to plant them.