international tragedy & a sense of hopelessness

what a day for international news… between the news about Afghanistan and the news about Haiti, I’m at a loss…

add the climate crisis to the midst, and reality really starts to look like a dystopian novel…

i feel hopeless today, unable to engage in lightheartedness.

i think about the bodies falling from that plane in Kabul.

i think about the before and after images from yesterday to today.

i think about the ways our international struggles are interconnected. and the ways in which i am complicit in so much pain and destruction around the world.

some days, it feels like too much to bear. and yet, i am one of hyper-privileged. i doom scroll while others literally watch their society crumble around them.

i struggle to know what to do with so much pain. so much death, so much heartbreak, so much loss.

over 1,400 people reported dead in Haiti. that number is unfathomable to me. i try to picture it. it’s more than my high school student body.

i think about the women, girls, and LGBTQ+ folks whose quality of life and sense of freedom have deteriorated overnight.

i think about the next 10-20 years, and how if we can’t handle a global pandemic, how the fuck are we going to manage intensifying environmental catastrophe??

i wonder if humankind will make it another 100 years…

i think about the scale of damage the united states has enacted globally in the 250 years of its existence

i think about the ways colonization continues to wreck havoc all around us.

and i think about how the people responsible for so much oppression and genocide look like me.

….

i think about how most people are too tired, overworked, burnt out, busy, stressed, underpaid, and wrapped up in their own struggle to do anything about any of this. and i don’t blame them for being distracted and beat down in a system designed to do exactly that.

but i do wonder what people will think when they look back (if humanity is around long enough for such retrospection)… i wonder if they’ll be horrified by our awareness around exactly what we were doing as we destroyed the planet. and that the best we could do was create memes about it…

(not to minimize the very real labor and powerful sacrifice of those who are organizing around the globe, such as the indigenous water protectors working to Stop Line 3.)

but fuck, dude. is this what the world burning looks like? people going about their daily routine, acting like everything’s normal until it’s finally at their door…

idk, maybe that’s the most human thing to do…