reenka

I suppose at times like this I'm almost tempted to tell my story.

And, in a lot of ways, it's the story of a girl who hated the world.

The way so many people feel about the country right now-- I know very well how that feels, because I'd felt it about the whole planet during my entire adolescence. And I don't even know where to start explaining it, and it's not that I'm saying 'you have no right to feel this way', but it's just so painful to me, having all those memories of hating everything brought back, and just feeling, basically... y'mean this is news? Y'mean people thought things were really okay before?

When I was growing up in inner-city Brooklyn New York, every single aspect of my existence sucked, and I blamed it on The System, on the Way The World Worked, on the way people didn't think and were complacent sheep, on the way being an atheist was more ridiculous in America than being a fundamentalist Christian, on the way money seemed to rule everything, on the way that the school system didn't care about gifted introverted kids or really educating us so much as herding us 'safely' and checking our guns and knives at the door. I was seriously afraid of extreme disaster striking at any moment-- what with the incessant small-scale war in Croatia people thought might explode into WW3, and global warming, and overpopulation, and basically, stupid people everywhere. And remember when we thought random thugs could buy nuclear weapons from Russia and blow up New York City...? Yeah. Also, High School in NYC really sucked and I really doubted the existence of intelligent life in the -world-, forget the country.

I knew I hated society when I came to school the first day of 10th grade, and suddenly there were guards at the door, checking my backpack for weapons; I knew then it wasn't going to get better.

At age 15, I knew I hated society (and the majority groupthink that drives it) when I heard about how forests are being razed for the oil corporations, how several priceless species are dying out every day (every day!) in the Amazon, how virtually every Presidency in the last 50 years has been built on lies and deceptions and trafficking with the very 'enemies' it was supposed to be fighting. All I had to do was turn on the news in 1993 and I could see we were all going to hell in a handbasket. Just hearing about people wanting to teach Creationism instead of evolution in Kansas made me despair for humanity. Every day, there was some new, amazing way that the people in charge of world could screw up, it seemed, and all of it felt like an attack against me, something that prevented me from living the life I envisioned for myself (nevermind my over-romantic expectations for a moment.)

Before I swathed myself in the sheer apathy that cloaked me from end of High School onward, I desperately wanted aliens to kidnap me, because I just couldn't handle the idea of having to live on this planet and take all the shit that all the uber-religious/capitalist people in power heaped upon me as a thinking caring human being. I knew it was all necessary and things would get better someday, even if it took WW3 to do it, but who wants to wait that long? I certainly didn't. I was 15 and I wanted to live somewhere I liked and enjoyed being, and that seemed pretty much impossible. George Bush Senior was President, and I thought the world was a special sort of hell made just for me.

It's really weird seeing people have similar sentiments-- the same old rage I remember-- now, just because of George Bush Junior. Mostly because I remember thinking so long ago, but isn't it obvious? Of course we're living in a nightmare. Of course we are. I mean, I've been there all along; y'mean other people didn't notice?

I spent my whole life here, from age 11 onward, feeling marginalized, it seems like. No one on the TV news ever said anything I agreed with or wanted to hear-- and all the people fighting for human rights and environmental protection faced obstacle after obstacle, with no end in sight-- a constant uphill battle. So I don't know when I realized that I'm stuck here, and I'm just going to have to deal-- just going to have to make the best of it. I don't remember the moment when my adolescent rage turned into a sort of seething, quiet discontent that translated into me ignoring everything and basically going "you guys go over there-- I'm over here-- good, then". I think I 'left', really, without leaving. I left as much as I could-- I stopped listening to the news, I stopped trying to really -do- anything after I got to the little oasis in the wilderness that is the college experience-- I came as a freshman to Binghamton University in 1996 and with a 3-year break, I'm still here in 2004, and you know what? I'm not even close to done, on purpose, because the real world, American society, "out there"-- out there kind of sucks in the really-not-sexy way.

So I know what it's like to feel completely disenfranchised and alienated and lost and confused and alone-- and it's from that standpoint that I wrote that about staying here, in this country, and perhaps regaining some of the desire to get involved that got burned out of me at age 16. I won't deny there were moments when I desperately wanted out, just recently-- I mean, after 9/11, I lived in a constant state of low-grade fear to the point where I was concerned for my safety and seriously thought I should move to Alaska just to be certain I won't be blown up next time I visit my mom in New York.

This is a story with no ending, of course. There's no moral here, nothing I can offer as words of wisdom to overcome the disgust it's completely normal to feel with the state of the country and the world & humanity itself. I know that disgust on a very intimate level, since I've felt it for so very long-- I can't very well say it's unfounded, wrong-headed or an overreaction.

All I can say is-- there's nowhere to go.

That is what I realized.

The world is all interconnected these days, and anywhere you go, America will follow you. Unless you really can manage to get abducted by aliens, or find the gateway to Faerie (in which case, let me know!)-- this is basically the breaks. This is what reality is (and was), and no amount of hatred or despair is going to make it any different. Hope is one thing, but hope isn't fully effective unless you've gone through the process of knowing exactly how things stand "as is" in the first place. Hope isn't going to fix anything-- there's no easy fix, and there's no escape from, well, human foibles and the present state of Western civilization (but death-- and time).

I realized that all we have is time, and we have no choice-- I have no choice-- but to play with the hand dealt me. I may want to have been born during the Bronze Age or the Middle Ages (I may not have known how to write, but I think I'd have been happier as an uneducated hedge-witch in the middle of nowhere)-- or 300 years from now when there'll be Mars or the moon to escape to. But I haven't been. Here we are, at the cusp of the 21st century, and the world is both on the verge of great, momentous change and at the same time, a horrible hanging threat of complete disaster worse than anything previously experienced. We were all unlucky enough to live in interesting times.

It is a heavy burden, I know-- the sheer awareness of the sheer magnitude and depth of the problem we're all facing as human beings. But this very awareness is what needs to spread. This despair and anger we're feeling-- that's what people want to avoid. That's why people voted Bush into office-- they don't want to know. They don't want to know the war in Iraq was unjust. They don't want to know that their Christian god isn't going to strike down the Muslims in a fury of holy fire. They don't want to know they're descended from monkeys and sea-anemones. They don't want to know they're all going to die whether or not the terrorists come to hasten it, and that their eventual demise is more likely to come from lung cancer 'cause of the cigarrettes they insist on smoking.

And can you really, really blame them?

Because this weight of awareness, of knowledge-- look-- look how it's affecting those of us who bear it. Look how destructive, how painful, how loathsome it is to lose your illusion of safety and predictability. If you see this knowledge as a "cure", then the 'cure' quite possibly hurts about as much as the disease of ignorance itself.

I spent the last 8 years not watching the news, not reading the paper, not graduating, not bothering to care-- for the same reasons. Real knowledge of my situation-- of my society-- of the state of my country and the rampant corruption everywhere there is power in it and the world at large-- that is soul-curdling stuff. I wanted to live my life and derive what pleasure I could from the things I loved to do, what art I could create, what love I could gather. I didn't want to face the monsters-- the wolves circling me, ironically, just as the Bush campaign's ads would have us believe. And the funny thing is-- the wolves are circling. The only disagreement I have with Mr Bush is that only we ourselves and our painful, terrible awareness of the situation has any chance of saving us from them.