The Best Of Us
Humanity still has some good ones
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The world we live in is a waking nightmare. A cascade of the worst humans in living memory grace our screens, the halls of Congress, the towers of ivory. Our entire society has become a neatly constructed simulacrum of what a society is meant to be. Human expression as represented to us in media is a facsimile of a facsimile of a facsimile of real humanity. It feels as if there is a deep nothingness behind all of it. The boundaries of acceptable discourse are a prison. The world burns around us while we sip our Starbucks and work at our email jobs and pretend like everything is a-okay. For those of us who have pierced the veil, who can see the violence and despair and real human suffering all around us, the banality of our daily existence can be overwhelming. There are real, pressing matters to attend to, there are people that can’t wait for “someday”, but there are also bills to pay and mouths to feed at home. And while we feel the intensity of the injustice we are surrounded by, so many more are impervious to it. It doesn’t touch them at all. The cold apathy they exhibit may well be a coping mechanism but it feels like complicity. They’ve acclimated themselves to our necropolitical environment and have managed to convince themselves that this is “just the way it is”. Worse, there are millions more who revel in the pain they create. Who either spend their lives justifying or excusing suffering, dismissing it as the cost of doing business, or actively try to inflict more of it. The vibes, my friends, are fucked.
It’s difficult to be a person who is acutely aware of all of this. Who sees that it doesn’t have to be this way, that there is an alternative. Who understands that we can change course if enough of us have the courage to come together and say “no”. That the people in power are not as strong as the power of the people (the rub being that the people don’t yet know it). That if only more of us believed in something better, we would be able to create it. It’s difficult to know all of this and also know that it is not happening any time soon. This world will break your heart, over and over again. There are monsters at our doorstep and all around us and it’s so hard not to just collapse in despair at the inhumanity of it all. It’s hard to remember that there is good in the world when there are devils everywhere we look.
Then something happens — you witness a moment of pure humanity, of pure sacrifice for the betterment of someone else, and it brings everything back into focus. It reminds you of why you’re here. And it’s not for the stuff - for the house, the car, the PS5, the morning latte. You’re here, on this wretched earth, because we are better than this, even if our current environment doesn’t reflect that. Sometimes it takes bearing witness to a profoundly human act to shake you out of your despair and realign you with your purpose.
Greta Thunberg’s SOS video, released when the Israelis illegally boarded the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, was the most recent of those moments for me.
I spend more than my fair share of time thinking about what it means to be human, what we owe each other, whether we can prevail over all of the dark forces we are surrounded by. I spend perhaps too much time lamenting how much good has been sucked out of the world for no reason at all aside from pure self-interested greed. It can be easy to forget that our better angels are everywhere. That there are people who haven’t let the world make them hard. But we can remember. We need only to look. I thank Greta for that powerful reminder. I certainly needed it.
She is the best of us. Everyone on that boat is. And for every person on that boat there are millions just like them whose names we will never know. This rotten place is full of demons but we have to hold on tight to the fact that there are Gretas in the world. That there are still so many countless millions who care a lot. Who would risk life and limb to save a stranger. Who believe in this collective human project and wouldn’t sell it out for any sum.
This world is so ugly, so broken. We have a cavalcade of barbarians at our doors and on the television screen and in the hallowed halls of congress, and we can easily lose sight of the fact that Gretas really do exist. It’s a colossal task just to not get caught in the doom loop of daily existence under this system. And being a Greta can come at a great cost, even if you have fame and status and money. None of that is necessarily enough to keep you safe from the forces that want to drag us all to hell. But the best of us will do it anyway, because they know that their belief in humanity is stronger than any bomb.
Beyond the hideous mirage that calls itself a civilized society and its hollow representatives, are the countless who would put it all on the line to wrest this world back from the brutes. Train your eyes to see them, let them guide you, refuse to succumb to the darkness that envelopes us. We weren’t put here, in this place, in this time, just to lament about what could’ve been. We are here to take an active role in changing it. The future is not fixed, all is not lost. Protect that fire that burns inside you, seek it in others, and let those flames cleanse the world so that we may one day start again.
The Marx sketch hit way too hard.
I wish as I was as articulate as you are.