It’s hard to be happy these days. Try as we might, it gets increasingly difficult to pretend that the times we live in are morally normal. Most of us have forgotten about U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, our continual bombings in Yemen and Pakistan, and our ever vigilant covert intelligence agencies that torture and terrorize people throughout the world, all for the financial interests of our governing corporate elite.
Most of us with Seattle-type professional jobs that push us up beyond $50,000 a year are skilled at pretending the economy is recovering. Few of us have struggling friends down in the $20,000 ghettos. We tend to think that everything’s OK because, for us, it is OK.
Seriously, how many of us know someone out of our economic class?
We pretend that education is stable and that teachers will be fine. What happened in Wisconsin, where the state legislature banned most collective bargaining by unions, will never happen here. We pretend that the pendulum will swing back to a moderate middle. We pretend that climate change will find a technological fix, the Seattle police will be reformed, politicians will choose people over profit. We work desperately hard at denying reality while shutting our eyes, closing our ears and closing our mouths.
But it’s getting harder to keep up the pretense. There is a feeling of exhaustion in our national spirit. Perhaps our capitalist dictatorship has so individualized us that we are beginning to awaken to the truth of Margaret Thatcher’s grand vision: “There is no such thing as society.” The world is becoming too big for solutions and when we the people have been disconnected from each other, weakened so that we are powerless to organize before the ravages of the gods of war and commerce.
In this time of sorrow and lamentation perhaps the only thing we can do is construct an alternative way of life by doing small things well. For example, instead of simply buying Real Change from a vendor, perhaps we should actually get to know our vendors. The notion of homelessness stops becoming an “issue” once you actually know someone who is struggling to keep or find a home.
In the face of the realities that poor people encounter each day, all of your well-thought-out systemic solutions for poverty become like used toilet tissue. What you discover, when a poor person becomes a friend with a name and a story, is that you are able to help in small ways, and in turn, you are helped in small ways. You change. Your attitudes and actions change. You see reality differently. You become emboldened to pursue social justice with such vigor, it overcomes your fear of personal loss. It is friendship that gnaws away at the pillars of capitalist dictatorship. It is friendship that collapses the cruelty of oppression. If we are to experience hope in such a time as this, we must become like termites, largely unseen as we gnaw away at rotten structures.