It's The End of the World As We Know It
Hollywood Images Pale in Comparison,
A Sunday Stream of Consciousness,
I went out to the ocean recently, just beyond the reach of the city. A quick getaway in a car with friends, under the hot sun on a flat land of sand and facing East, toward a sea I’d rather be and still finding my groove and grounding with beautiful women, just so we could forget the world for awhile.
It was worthy to play, to breathe and cold plunge into a natural bed of salt water so my hair could soften and my soul could experience a moment of bliss.
And yet, I cannot help but think of the end of the world.
I have seen it, you know.
No, not just that one movie on Netflix the Obamas helped pay for, “Leave The World Behind.” Though there was something cinematic about getting crisp at the beach and wondering if a mysterious ship would dock while Russian agents claimed Long Island (Hey, the movie was weird like that).
In the film, the characters left the world behind only to be confronted with themselves as surrounding tragedies ripped away their security of home.
I felt that.
The apocalypse is on our door step, but white folks don’t want to recognize it. It’s largely because western white culture, in all its violent glory, crafted the apocalypse in other parts of the world where we are not.
And I have been.
I witnessed it.
It’s worse than the incessant movies we make about it because it’s real and unlike the actors we’ve become, there is no home to return after shooting…the film, the gun, the canons of our emotional hell.
America is not ready.
COVID only revealed us. And at the 5-year mark of scrambling through lock downs, masks and movement restrictions, at the 5-year mark of George Floyd’s murder by police and the eruption of our Black Brothers and Sisters crying out “we matter” and “I can’t breathe,” we are at a cross roads about how we go forward, because this time, there will be no safe place.
Oh, Ash, stop the doomsday! You’re so depressing!
Am I?
Or am I voicing your worst fears on your worst day when you’re alone in the dark doom scrolling, trying to avoid doom, isolated from purpose, place and community?
Mm, struck a chord? ;) mmk
Hear me out, we didn’t fully address the Trauma that came with what happened 5-years ago, and what led up to it. We let that previous guy back in office, bonded to the symptom of America’s coercive colonized mind. Americans are so desperate for a nostalgic reality that never existed so we live in a stupor of Avoidance and Anxiety.
It’s unraveling before our eyes.
In the film, Civil War, the main character, Lee (Kirsten Dunst) is a harrowing woman, reflecting on the wars “over there” she’d covered and its reflection in an alternate reality of modern New York, in a world where Californians and Texans took up arms against the East Coast.
Her message is clear, “Don’t do this,” She laments.
But we are here and nowhere else and we’ve done it and it’s coming.
I could account for the tribal split we see in shows like The Last of Us, or the rounds of violence and trafficking we see in Game of Thrones. The frontlines of war zones showed me a landscape for which even Hollywood pales in comparison.
And, as long as the focus was on defeating “the other side,” whatever we perceive that is and disseminated by the elitists in power, we’ll descend into the messes they create while they keep holding onto faux luxury.
In some strange way, being reduced to extremities offers a sense of belonging to a ‘collective survival’ for all the ‘right reasons,’ or what we perceive is right, even if it’s not. As a result, the end justifies the means, that is, violence achieves control.
When everyone in the group shares traumatic experiences, the depth of the soul is found at the heart of suffering something together. And suffering always unites. It then gives us identity.’
~ Reckoning in the Rubble, 2021
In fight mode, the sufferable identity can turn to violent action, and lead deeper into the rabbit holes of conspiracy if there is no place to negotiate.
But what if we could usurp a story of division and unite with one goal? It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not utopia. And it does require alertness and haste.
The landscape we are in, is controlled by the wars of Men, a patriarchal system rooted in a dominance culture where violence has priority .
We have to mobilize away from isolation and into communion, fellowship and intimate connection. And we gotta do it quick.
We know, war is a profitable business. And the war lords of the modern age seem to keep getting fucking richer in the business of death and misery, by infection via algorithms and spending billions on propaganda. It has a dizzying effect.
I wish the end of the world was a clean jump cut in a 2-hour film. Let’s be honest, it’s be great if it ended like I Am Legend, when he realizes the whole mess was his fault, and he sacrifices himself, or if only we could end the war like Neo in Matrix 3.
Wait a minute, what was their end? Their death, their death to what was. Maybe we don’t need to have a physical death, but a psychological one, and take the risks, our lives, our work, our status to overturn a system.
The problem of course in movies is set in the first few minutes to the climax and then boom, some sort of saving grace at the end makes us think either: it’s all fantasy and would never happen or we could figure it out and magically be heroes.
Yeh, it’s not like that.
Instead it’s the slow motion burn we’re all surviving right now, piece by piece, laws falling by the waist-side as ICE kidnaps people and riots against protestors in Los Angeles, as our tax dollars go toward a Genocidal regime created by the United States and western colonizers, as the U.S. president in place in spite of convictions and makes no secret about his quid-pro-quo with the wealthy all while the environment implodes because bombs are destroying Mama Earth, people are dying of starvation, illness, toxins, the sinister violence becomes more apparent with every click on our phones.
Looking away isn’t the answer. Sitting in doomsday brain wash isn’t it either. Willful Ignorant Bliss is not a better state of being. Isolation just isn’t it.
Gotta get up, gotta take action. Less faith in the universe, I told a friend, more faith in what we can do together.
From the personal to the systemic and back again, we’re being summoned to Get. The. Fuck. UP. A massacre is here, and it’s gaining strength, from natural erosions, from militarized governments on citizens, and the divisions of those colonized minds desperate to hang on to the old.
The old is gone. The end of the world is Here, and it happens over and again, it always has, will it get worse this time in this generation? Or is it — just we the ‘White Tribe,’ are doing everything to avoid Experiencing it?
Let’s not. What if, instead, we let ourselves FEEL the Trauma of it all falling apart? What if we acknowledge it? What if we helped eradicate injustice systems, and created hope with resistance?
What if we took a page out the Palestinian’s guide? What if we decolonized, and joined up with Indigenous friends? What if we really learn from the Black women telling us things….
Ya know,
Toni Morrison told us to get out of our “little selves,” and Audre Lorde told us to stop using the “Master’s tools” to get out of the “Master’s house” and Assata Shakur reminded us empires don’t give their oppressed liberation by way of asking nicely, and Dr. Angela Davis, living legend reminds us Abolition IS the way forward.
We might not be so surprised at the next big catastrophic sting, the noise and cracked windows.
What if:
You took the end of the world sequence and softened with another person’s Vulnerability?
Fought for Ceasefire or held the powers that be accountable, and instead of waiting for the next Rupture to become an escapism rapture?
And perhaps started the painstaking path of Repair work?
Return to Reconnection over a few records, and found trust with a stranger who might just have the Medicine we can be for each other?
Nothing can go back to ‘how it was.’
I’ve seen the end of world; it’s devastating.
Yes, we are all devastated right now, I get it.
And also, mm,
I’ve seen how the end of the world finds strength, survivorship, resists and goes again. It commands us to be present, requires acknowledgement and charges us into ‘Direct Action’ together.
Ash Gallagher is a Veteran War Journalist, Activist, Writer & Speaker. Connect here to get in touch and work w/ her.
For a soul session to make sense of it all, check out more w/ Ash here and connect.
Resources:
Article by Ash, Abolition Defends Tortured Men.
Abolition Feminism, Dr. Angela Davis
Watch The Encampments on Watermelon+ Pictures
It's Always Been About Bodies
The following is a rePost from Ash’s Medium platform, originally published on 29 July 2024