Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Well, I took time off from writing (and from following major news for that matter) . A detox of sorts. Mine was somewhat required due to life circumstances from a very large move across the country. An imperative that simply didn’t allow time to focus on much of anything else. I probably wouldn’t have had the ability to hold off on scrolling and bemoaning without that forced interlude, but we will take our spiritual prods where we can get them.

I certainly encourage others to take a moment off as well. Not even weeks, perhaps simply leaving your phone in another room and stepping away for a few hours. Do it a little bit each day and increase the time span as you are able (but don’t be a dick to your friends and family who might need you, let them know what you’re up to if you’re a terminally available person—that will scare them if you suddenly go silent). Do this if only to show how jangled up our minds have become. I am not saying to seclude yourself in the forest and completely lose the ability to verbalize, but at least take some time off from following the terrible reports, and stop reacting to the latest shocking event of the moment with the fullness of your blood pressure and cortisol. This probably sounds like a vantage point of privilege, and it is. Having the ability to not need to concern oneself of the horrors at the exact moment they are reported on is a privilege, but they will all be there when you return, sadly enough. And when you return hopefully you will bring with you a perspective and ability to fight the injustices with a more untangled parasympathetic nervous symptom. I think I have achieved this to perhaps 5%, but hey, we have to keep trying. Any attempt is valuable.

We vastly underestimate how much of the current system is placed together, not as a grand conspiracy, but a conveniently congruent set of defaults those in power have launched into place. It is a given that we will spend much of our time unhappy, wheels spinning without traction, and fully believing that we are powerless in the face of it all. If we truly realized the power we have in a collective manner and what we have within ourselves, the results would be unrecognizable. We all know this on some level.

It’s certainly simple to theorize this sort of thing with the masses plunging into a decidedly non-thoughtful future, but the theorizing of others with more toxic ideology has certainly been able to pierce the consciousness and result in actual societal changes. The pure nonsense from writers like (yes, I know I mention her too much) Ayn Rand have impacted so many of those who rose to leadership positions in our society. Her junk food style of philosophy has been able to trend us towards the selfishness that we now know all too well. Stillness and empathy are hollowed out by those with damaged and unquestioning minds. It’s wonderful to find worldviews that match your pathology. Hate women? Feel threatened by alternative sexuality….well, here’s some conservative Christianity for you. Want to hoard money and not feel concern for the homeless people you step over on your way to glittering high rise places of finance? Well, I’m sure something from the University of Chicago will fit your needs. We have to stop giving even 1% validity to these blueprints written in hateful self-serving ink.

The thousand small choices of history and all of those individual decisions…….that trajectory has been the one that has dominated, and it is steering us towards oblivion. Not the least of which is this normalization of wanton violence. The notion that cooperation and respect is somehow a weakness is now much more mainstream than even a couple of decades ago. Our belief in an inability to change anything simply adds ballast to the terrible ship, aiming straight for “here be dragons” on the map.

At one time, rural areas of America were hotbeds of populism –and not the reactionary vicious type we see now. This wasn’t all that long ago. Those in power have been able to convince workers that their enemy is someone working for a better life instead of who the true villains of this story are. I sit in a city that flat would not have been built back without the hard and skilled work of people from Mexico after Katrina. The lack of gratitude is astounding. I think those in power currently know the formula. They demonize an other. It could be anyone. It can be trans people, those who are new to the country, women who want control of their bodies……they just need an other to divert attention from themselves. So many simply fall for it. And they fall for it from the trickle of propaganda they willingly ingest.

I bring this very obvious notion up to discuss how we are all ingesting similar toxic propaganda that allows for only so much discourse in a narrow window. Those of us on the left think we are immune just because but when we watch any reports that say “we bombed Iran” that embedded “we” is a virus. I didn’t bomb anyone. I doubt you did. When you take a small break from ingesting even what you consider neutral media, you certainly begin to notice the fingerprints of the oligarchs. We are so much more than the agreed upon identities of our nationality, our sex on the birth certificate, the color of our skin. They want us fixated on the minutiae so we do not realize we are the universe. They are the greedy pathologies that have taken over, like cancer to healthy cells.

This is my long-winded way of encouraging a small break for everyone. Read a classic, identify one thing that sounds beautifully outrageous, but that you’ve always wanted to do, and go out and do just that. Then come back to the rest of us with a new story and a new outlook. At times you have to change up these established patterns to be able to see again.

Kathleen Wallace writes out of the US Midwest. Her writing is collected on her Substack page.

@CP