This post used to be about power and violence and the storming of the Capitol (the Founders overthrew their king in order to award themselves liberty from his taxation while they themselves were enslaving other humans so really what did we expect since cognitive dissonance is our true founding principle and we will not reset the concentration of power until we reckon with that fact) but then today while driving to the woods I was reminded by the tenderness in Eddie Vedder’s voice that growing up in the age of irony made me self-conscious to the point of inertia and hopelessness because in the post-Vietnam post-Watergate era it was considered naive to be earnest and enthusiastic and so I often responded with flat affect sarcasm and despondency and part of what was so widely alluring about Eddie Vedder I think to many of us whether or not we saw it that way at the time was the willing vulnerability woven through a pretty traditionally masculine performance because we aren’t able to adequately love ourselves and each other because our society is predicated on the idea that a centralization of power is the only true bulwark against what we fear, when a decentralization of power is what will enable us to meet the necessary and natural suffering of being human without adding to it, and there is really no arguing that building a more peaceful future is going to take dismantling not only White supremacy but also patriarchy because the constructs of race and gender are tools of capitalism which is the practice of fear-based centralization of power, whereas having enough food and having healthcare makes one less likely to inflict violence, decentralization of resources means decentralization of power so rather than distilling power into the individual it is dispersed amongst the collective and if we’re all cared for and not in fear maybe competition and fantasy violence won’t feel good and maybe they don’t actually feel good but feel satisfying because they feel necessary because we’re all living in fear because we don’t feel taken care of, and I’ll readily admit that within the past week I’ve watched a few episodes of Cobra Kai and rapped along with every single lyric of “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun” because we’re made of what we’re made of but I’m going to keep trying to unmake those parts of myself that work in tandem with the centralization of power in the ways I’ve been taught to do because my fear has been exploited in order to keep power where it has accumulated and while I used to think of resistance as pushing back, that brings to mind an act that inspires reaction and what I’d be pushing on is far stronger than my little old body so now I visualize that we, the collective, are water eroding the structures of power, using connectedness and flow to weaken it and turn the pieces into sand that can be spread along a continuum that is the bed of our progress.

I guess I’m glad January’s almost over.