Are We There Yet?

No. But it doesn't mean that "there" doesn't exist.

That’s me in the dump truck. Guess what’s in it- your shit.

If you're wondering why
All the love that you long for eludes you
And people are rude and cruel to you
I'll tell you why

You just haven't earned it yet, baby
You just haven't earned it, son
You just haven't earned it yet, baby
You must suffer and cry for a longer time
You just haven't earned it yet, baby
And I'm telling you now

- The Smiths, You Just Haven't Earned It Yet Baby

For the past three days (or so) my news feed has been largely dominated with “died suddenly”-related articles; stuff from MSM and MSM-adjacent sources about deaths themselves as well as surprisingly frank research seeping out from under the Cone of Silence and, of course, a renewed burst of Emily Oster-esque thinkpieces about how it’s not my fault, it’s nobody’s fault really, and all of this is unproductive, and “shut up, she explained” defiance.

I’ve also read polls suggesting (because that is, at MOST, all polls will ever do) public sentiment is shifting towards correctly attributing the explosion of died-suddenlies to the shots.

You’d think with all I’ve learned and directly experienced about the movements of people in large groups I wouldn’t be surprised that “opinion polls” about things I would tend to think of as pretty firm beliefs shift at the speed they do, or that they even shift AT ALL in the way they do.

I could make this post into a much longer story, but I won’t; I’m trying to work on that aspect of my writing and I also think it’s more powerful if it illustrates a broader point (on which much ink could be spilled in specifics) succinctly.

Most if not all of us in what I’ve broadly termed the “dissenting community” have been frustrated, sometimes to the point of despair or rage, in particular at the INJUSTICE of Everything Going On Right Now. It all seems of a kind- COVID biofascism, climate tyranny, and the unapologetic war on native cultures being waged by liberal democratic governments across the western world but most pornographically in America. It’s all the same thing in at least one major way: we know the dicks responsible and we want them named and facing real, tangible consequences, and there seems to be a kind of triumphant delight at this stage of the game in not only brazenly blocking the truth with transparent Ozmite curtains but in informing us in sickly-sweet tones that justice isn’t coming because that’s how the real world works- and anyway, it’s mean to want that and if there’s one thing we aren’t at this stage of our vaunted civilization it’s mean. Wrong, murderous, insane, but never mean.

Why did American Revolutionaries revolt- and do real, committed, goal-oriented violence- over things we don’t do anything about besides bitch and complain (and far worse things besides)? I see it as a factor of two things: scale and connectivity.

Simply put, as awful as the indignities we’ve all suffered in the past few years from all the aforementioned sources have been, a critical mass of us haven’t been truly destroyed by them, and I put myself in this category- for all my social, financial, professional, and emotional damages at the hands of COVID biofascists and other sources du jour, I still have running water and electricity and enough food to eat and my overall health and still own my property. Some of those are quite precarious holds, but they remain holds nonetheless.

Similarly, the American and other revolutionaries of that age occupied much smaller and more homogenous communities. There are huge numbers of people that are similar to us today in terms of national or racial or cultural or religious identity that are scattered out of sight (sometimes within single digits of miles of us, even) and we simply cannot give a shit about all of them. Yes, even if we personally have not been thoroughly destroyed as in the aforementioned paragraph, lots of our notional neighbors have, but we’re not as directly impacted by their suffering and don’t have the emotional connection to really hurt on their behalf, even if we’re empathetic people.

To sum: I do not believe any longer that we are doomed to die a slow boil of inertia and apathy and laziness. There just aren’t enough of us suffering beyond homeostasis- which is, of course, what boiling the frog is all about, but I don’t believe the boil is slow enough anymore and it’s too late to reverse its course short of turning the heat off altogether.

We will not be an outraged minority forever. The bad news is it has to get a lot worse first. The “good” news is it probably will.