The news is bad, really bad. And truthfully, there really isn't much any of us can do about it. There is no political party, no media, no organizing capacity, no money, no optimistic scenario that gives us confidence that the leaders of our society either care, or even know, about our needs and dreams. All we have is our weak, pitiful, often morbid protests, and an occasional burst of enthusiasm, like joining the U.S. Uncut movement, a grassroots campaign against corporate tax cheats.
With time, we realize how lame everything is and nothing that we do has any structural, systemic effect. Like I said, the news is bad.
And then there's climate change, permanent war, the erosion of civil liberties, the ever-escalating fascism of both the religious and political right-wing, and, lest we forget, as we mostly do forget, the increase in homelessness, unemployment and foreclosure. There is so much bad out there that the only rational response is denial. The graveyard is so full of dead bodies that all one can realistically do is whistle past it as one walks through it at night.
And it is night in America. Day is coming, but not in our lifetime. The dawn is still decades away. My generation and the one after mine will need to die off. Perhaps only then will our grandkids have the imaginative desperation to revolt, to dream new dreams, and then, with courage, to dismantle what is left of the American Empire and rebuild without the deceptions of benevolence that we lived.
In the meantime, my counsel is to build an ark. I've been thinking a bit about the old monastic movements of ancient lore. They were arks. The monastic movement kept flickers of hope alive, kept a wee bit of light lit through the dark age of imperial collapse. Monasteries were arks creating small scale, self-sustaining local economies, educational schools, earth medicine hospitals and safe spaces from continual violence. Monasteries kept the stories alive: stories of dreams and visions, stories of heroes and saints, of struggles and, of course, of crucifixion, betrayal and loss. In other words, monasteries were lifeboats in an age of death. I've begun to think that only a movement toward a new monasticism will enable us to survive the bad news of our current collapsing empire.
I'm not sure how to create an ark, and I don't know if I built it if it would even float. All I know is that our institutions and their leaders have forsaken us. We're all we've got left. Perhaps if we band together in small mutual aid groups of 10 or 20, (then maybe yoking together into mini-societies of 100 to 150) will it be enough to endure imperial collapse. Maybe if we can just stay alive our grandkids will rise up and summon the courage to be the good news we once sought to live.