Uncertain Paradigms

Saturday, September 17, 2022

I have had this feeling increasingly for the last few months, and I'm wondering if other people have been feeling something similar.

I've had some trouble explaining the feeling to myself (hmm... does this phrase actually mean "understanding” it?), but the closest I can come is this: I think my perspective has undergone a genuine (no hyperbole) paradigm shift. Or maybe it's more like I am straddling the two paradigms that cannot co-exist, but I just don’t yet know what the new one is. Are you in a similar state?

In a way, I guess you could say it started (?) when DT was elected in 2016. Remember that feeling on Wednesday, the day after Election Day -- and all those “What the F* Just Happened” feelings of those first months? I remember saying “The President” to people, and then we would just stand there, staring at each other, wide-eyed with no words. And it was also in early 2017 that the "Me Too" movement broke out onto the international stage – like, erupted, remember? In that same year, I taught a class inside Rikers Island (prison), which was not nothing in terms of giving a shake to my perspective, and I happened to turn 50, too, just because. Then in 2018, something serious clicked inside my head (which I couldn’t really name then, either) when I saw a presentation of the movie 'Dawnland' (about Maine’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission addressing “Indian Schools”) -- while, or near the time that I was reading 'Koba, the Dread,' a revelatory book about Stalin (in order to compare/contrast with DT) (spoiler alert: they are way too much alike). Plus, it was all in that same time period when Greta Thunberg was coming on the scene, and saying what needed to be said in a voice that many new people could hear, and the kids from the Stoneham Douglas (Parkland) mass shooting (on Valentine’s Day, 2018) were emerging as young leaders, and I happened to be teaching a documentary class to new adults that was structured around identifying and explaining >problems< that they felt were not fully appreciated by enough people. I got some seriously compelling and informative work in each of those three semesters. California and the Amazon were burning like never before in recorded history; the "surge" of refugees from Central America (and how the US responded to them) was heart-breaking – as was the “surge” of refugees from so many places during that time; Hong Kong was full of protests because democracy was on its way out; North Korea seemed like it really might nuke us; the US (DT) pulled out of both the INF and the Paris Accord. Brexit! And THEN there was this Global Freaking Pandemic, during whose relatively early stages, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd were killed by police, dropping the very last white-supremacy straws for some people (uprisings), and bringing to light for many previously clueless people the need for real systemic change and some GODDAM CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING.

Am I missing anything? Oh yeah -- an attempt >to forcibly overtake the seat of government and prevent a peaceful transition of power< in the United States!

Meanwhile, multiple U.N. reports (among other sources, as well) got released on the state of earth’s “climate,” saying "THE METEOR IS COMING," and then “THE METEOR IS EVEN CLOSER NOW, WHY ARE YOU JUST SITTING THERE?” (allusion to 'Don't Look Up').

It's been a crammed seven years, right? I mean, Hell’s bells! I can't even go into all the additional, meaningful, day-in-and-day-out Things That Happened -- but you know what they were; maybe I missed an event that was especially moving for you (shootings, invasions, floods, tornados, earthquakes, tsunamis). And there were good things, too! Maybe we made new friends, or babies were born to people close to us (or ourselves); people got married, or graduated, or came out as whatever they needed to come out as; we completed projects important to us; we got that phrase “Nevertheless, she persisted,” and Amanda Gorman performed that poem at the inauguration in that amazing dress. But honestly, those are not the things that really roiled my psyche from the age of 48 (when I went through a tough "midlife crisis" time, which is probably not irrelevant), to now.

My point is – How can any of us be the same people we were in the summer of 2015? It can’t be only me who feels that some kind of deep, existential shift has taken place, right? I don’t mean, “Who ‘thinks’ that change has happened,” and I don’t mean, “Who feels the stress of it all” – because I trust that just about anyone reading this would raise their hand to both questions. I mean, I feel myself looking out at this planet from a new and unfamiliar vantage point, and in so doing, necessarily, I am seeing things differently – such a weak phrase! Here’s an example: yesterday morning I was at the kitchen sink, rinsing an empty plastic hummus container before putting it in the recycling bin, and I was suddenly aghast that I was using clean drinking water to do this – that we all, as a matter of habit and quotidian banality, do and have for all of our lives. I felt in my bones the scarcity of clean water in an ever-increasing amount of the world (including our own “First World” country), and I saw an opulence and decadence in this normal task that was all but horrifying. It was an Emperor’s New Clothes moment, or like I saw the code of the Matrix. That’s what a paradigm shift is, right? And I’m having Emperor’s New Clothes/“take the red pill” moments every few days, it seems.

We are not living in the world that we were living in seven years ago. Whatever vision we had for our lives and the lives of our family and friends, for our country and the globe – it needs to be replaced. We have to reconceive ourselves. We need to cross over from the life that we have always inhabited – the one we received from the twentieth century – to a new way of being. And we need to do it this year, right away, before the end of 2022. Of course there will be increments and steps and stages – static – and not every person will attend to every aspect of the new ways (we are only human) – but this is what I have been seeing: the revolution is upon us; the war is underway and we are losing. This room that you are sitting in is not the room that it was in 2015 because the world is not that world anymore. This is not someone urging you to “be the change” the way people have always urged us, because the context of our choices is now a new and uncharted terrain; i.e., whatever we thought “be the change” meant before, it now means something else. I just can’t quite tell what. That’s how I feel.

Yes, I have no idea what to do with all of this. I’ll watch TV tonight; I’ll go to work on Monday; I’ll do some grocery shopping, go to worship, and read my book in between. I’ll shower with my clean drinking water, and I’ll use my phone and computer that run only because of atrociously polluting mining practices – I might even buy a new computer this week. Being alive does continue in this weird flow of apparent perpetuity. I always think of Marvin Gaye singing, “Who is to blame, when we can’t stop living?” But I think we are to blame – I think from here on out, each of us – with limited exceptions – is to blame for what unfolds in the next, say, ten critical years.

I’m not looking for advice, and I’m definitely not looking for sympathy. I’m looking for company. I’m wondering if there are other people standing in the virtual crowd feeling like some sort of flood light needs to come on, or feeling like they need to mourn for everything we ever thought our lives would be, or feeling a combination of derision, amusement, and fear when other people talk normally about solving the world’s problems with tactics and explanations we’ve been using for decades.

Anyone? Paradigm shift?

Is it just me?

Bueller?