Scared Yet?

To “never complicate the simple, or simplify the complex” is excellent advice. Or, perhaps, do not over-rely on positive thinking, stating a positive position when things are really pretty dire. It is wishful thinking without Santa Claus’ elves. Polarisation exists. It is exhausting. It is impossible to reason with it. Absurd sweeping statements are made. Sometimes they are insulting. Sometimes they invite such cognitive dissonance that it makes the ears ring. Sometimes they seem to patently originate from another biosphere.

Positive thinking just doesn’t cut it. Sometimes the dark needs to be acknowledged, the sheer factuality of negativity has to be grappled. Such blatant divisions cause schisms. In the psyche. In families. Houses subside and then fall.

But a pessimistic assessment of outer reality does not mean that you need to remain passive. Morality, no matter what one bases it on, is rarely ambiguous. As Arundhati Roy advises in the quote I culled from a back issue of Resurgence, ” watch…try and understand…never look away…and never, never forget.”

“Be Scared for Your Sons”

But for how long have you

despaired on behalf of your daughters?

Those girls paid seventy-one cents to every dollar

your son gets selling the same lemonade

from the same soft drinks concession.

For how long have you

denied the debt owed your daughters?

Those who care for you in old age,

that feed you, visit you, wipe your bottom,

clean your clothes, wash you

even after you have exhaled your final breath.

For how long have you

despised the ones who stole your daughter?

The ones who violated her childhood.