Sitting with Time
What I Can't Grasp About Yesterday and Tomorrow
Time is something we put so much emphasis on, but if I am being honest I struggle with conceptualizing time.
Civil rights leaders from the civil rights movement still being around blows my mind. Rosa Parks died when I was a teenager. She was 20 years old in the time period Sinners took place.
Rosa would have been at the juke joint
My brain hurts trying to even imagine what different eras of her life looked and felt like. I have no clue of life in a fully segregated south. I was born 20+ years afterwards. The years between softened racial and systemic tensions to a point no matter how much I read the actual feeling of living under those conditions can't fully be grasped.
The first time I could legally vote it was for a Black man. Now in my 30's I can tell you 20 years ago which is exactly when Rosa Parks died in 2005 doesn't feel that long ago. So I know now that the gap between my birth and the civil rights movement was not that big but can't get over the feeling it was a long time ago.
I am still suffering from the systemic issues they were dealing with today
This is what I mean when I say I struggle to grasp the concept of time. It could be the struggle to understand the warnings of climate change, the impact of a bad tenure of government lasting ramifications after it's gone, or the struggles of my ancestors and grasping I am still suffering from the systemic issues they were dealing with today.
When Al Gore in the 2000s said we need to focus on climate change and we only have 20 years to figure it out, I could not actually visualize 20 years into the future and what it will look like to grasp the urgency of the message. It's bad - that's understandable - but the destruction that it would take to get to very bad I could not have foreseen. When we were told two decades ago we only had 15 years before major consequences, the image of a summer camp flooding in Texas like what happened over the weekend was not on my radar.
I feel the same way about the state of the country. Americans are clinging onto the hope that once the president is out of office we can begin to make things right again. The truly optimistic ones say things will get better after the midterms. So 2 years to stop bad things from happening and 4 years before change can start to take place.
We might be staring at 2 decades of a corrupt failing shell of a federal government
4 years of destruction and chaos leads me to believe the 4 years after Donald will be messy. There are too many variables to tell how long we are fucked. We might be staring at 2 decades of a corrupt failing shell of a federal government slowly collapse in on itself. My back is going to crack way more and the first 2 decades of my life will reflect a very different version of America than the next 2 decades.
This is also what I mean when I say I struggle to grasp the concept of time. I fall for the planning fallacy by thinking once Donald is gone we can real quick clean things up back to close to the state we were in beforehand or quicker. It's going to be a longer more painful road forward than what we imagine.
The anxieties of the human existence seems to revolve around time, but as humans we are not great with time. My thoughts swirl constantly through these timeframes and I do not have a great answer. Thinking too much in the past or too much in the future seems to bring more anxiety.
Can we reverse pollution that is driving climate change before it's too late?
Will our generations of children still be fighting against the system like we are now and our ancestors or can we eliminate a few issues for them? Can we reverse pollution that is driving climate change before it's too late? Will America bounce back before I am senior citizen? I have no answers to any of these questions, however, I do know that any act to better these situations is a revolutionary act.
To give hope to a future we have no clarity to is to give hope to the future of humanity. We do not have to understand time in order to change the future.
Stay Woke,
Loc
