The Last of It
We’re reached the end game.
Man, what a slog. Am I right, whiteboys? Kudos to you, if you soldiered through every sector of this entire chronicle. That clusterfucking year was dense, if it was anything.
The good news is, you won’t be hearing much more from me regarding my stances on the past and present states of Pax Americana, after wrapping this sordid saga of 2020. I’ve said my peace. It’s all I can do, other than to continue offering ally support to BIPOC peoples, and carry on my work in my personal reconciliations of my whiteboy origins.
Fret not, subscribers. My weekly live column from The Dogs of Generation X offers musings on current cultural happenings across Planet Earth, especially those concerning our venerable Generation of X. And there’s my serialized sci-fi fantasy series The Worldshift Chronicles, a tale of magic, intrigue, and adventure I enthusiastically recommend to anyone looking for compelling escapism. All my cards on the table, fiction is where I shine, I daresay. I also have another sector titled The Road, wherein I wax poetic about life, death, and roadside memorials.
In editing all these observances of 2020, four years later, it’s easy to conclude it was a rough experience, looking into the face of the void. A lot of humans don’t make it back from that precipice, especially artists, writers, and musicians. Me? I think my jaded nature helped harden me to some of it. But realizing the full scope of the ruling class across the world, my ancestral beginnings, my tribal primordia still nestled within me, my continued perpetuation of that caste system in virtually anything I do or see, from ordering a chai latte at a coffee shop to buckling under the latest foolishness from the Supreme Court…it’s almost too much to bear. Once seen, never unseen. Once understood…that’s when it gets dicey, because every day after, you’re challenged by the reality you still live and breathe within that same system that’s actively killing Black, Brown, female, and LBGTQ folk.
I probably mentioned it earlier, when I was beating that drum as many times as I’ve done in this narrative, but emotional evolution does indeed have a price. The more empathic you become, the more often you’ll experience a paradox of sorts, in that while that enlightenment gives you much wisdom and increased reserves of inner strength, it also makes you more susceptible to the interconnections of the web that ties us all. The problem with that is, because so many of us are lost or operating under illusions instead of realities, it becomes harder to endure, due to so many people suffering, or being confused, broken, or traumatized.
Tread carefully. Keep learning. Extend compassion and tolerance for any and all you come across. But try to filter their incoming vibes, particularly the sorrowful ones, or they’ll overwhelm you. Don’t turn it off! Don’t desensitize! Don’t tuck it away into your brain’s back closet. Just try and take it for what it is and incorporate it into your understanding that eventually, those people will sort themselves out, in this world or another. I would say it gets easier with practice. The truth is, it doesn’t. Nobody said evolution was easy. It isn’t.
So.
Tell me, whiteboys.
After all this ranting and raving about Californian apocalypse, racial justice, origins of authority, caste, class warfare, climate change, pestilence, sociology, politics, and a wide variety of human conditions and dispositions…what have we learned?