#11 - LIVING THROUGH HISTORY
Hey everyone, welcome to Issue #6A of JAYA TIME. Hoping you’re all remaining healthy and sane in this, the scariest thing we’ve likely ever lived through.
Plugs:
I was on No Pods No Casters last week.
I was also on Blocked Party.
Also, note that I included an audio version of the essay this week, which is usually a paid exclusive. Guess I just wanted to show you all what it was like. If you liked this, consider subscribing.
1. JAYA’S TAKE OF THE WEEK
Last night, on the phone, Alex told me that we were living through history, and I can’t quite get that thought out of my head. History is happening, right now. History is always happening, of course. But somehow, now, it’s happening more. The slow processes that have been building up for years and decades and centuries are all peaking right now, together. It’s a great and terrible symphony that history is playing for us, and we all have the unhappy occasion of living through the climax.
Of course, the present moment hasn’t always lent itself to such stunning crescendos. We used to live in a lovely little lull in the melody, where the notes did nothing but crowd each other and not travel very far. Life in the ‘90s, at the supposed end of history, was boring. We might not have all been reading Fukuyama in elementary school, but it wasn’t hard to discern that the adults in our lives largely thought that life was meant to be a staid, inert sort of thing. I was bitterly disappointed when I read in my school-issued social studies textbook, that things in America were largely all right. Even the news stories that filtered down to us on the playground were kind of lousy. The Lewinsky scandal, yes, while salacious and rather funny to us, didn’t carry the world-historical import that a world war did.
The 90s were hardly as ahistorical as I thought them to be — genocide and conflict continued apace, enough to satisfy me for years, had I known about them. And importantly, everything that happened in those years — the increased reliance on the private sector, the swell of racialized criminalizing, the delegitimization of anything approaching a public good — fed what is happened today, and the all-but-certain tragedies that will unfold in the next few weeks. For the mushroom to sprout, the fungus must grow and strengthen and thrive underground, after all.
What make climaxes ultimately so scary, is that what goes up, must come down. Social distancing, home quarantine: it’s all necessary to prevent an unacceptable level of death. I’m not complaining, nor am I foolishly advocating for a different cure — no matter what our President says, a treatment less severe would not properly snuff this virus out. What scares me is the level of potential energy generated by us all being kept artificially in our homes. The sheer mass of do-something weighing on all of our psyches terrifies me. Something’s going to have to give soon, something is bound to break under the pressure and I fear what will break will be — us.
We are being helped, by forces greater than ourselves, into breaking.
A good bunch of sticks is nearly impossible to bend, but a solitary twig will easily break. There are those who would prefer we be twigs. We know who they are. Government, ruled by big business. Big business, enabled and pampered by government. Financiers across the world and the invisible hand they puppeteer, the one that is just itching to snap us in half. And of course, the neoliberals, who hope that a shiny new lacquer will disguise our frailty and weakness.
And sometimes you get resistance to solidarity from the sticks themselves. There are those who will not gather with the refuse of a sycamore tree, thank you very much. Once they figure out how to let snap all the accursed sticks that simply don’t belong, once they get a uniform collection of branches that can properly trace their provenance to a strong maple tree of good heritage, then they’ll bunch, but not before that event occurs.
There’s an alternative, of course.
We could gather in solidarity.
If we’re bound to break, if there’s bound to be a change in us and our society, based on what we experience in the next few weeks of quarantine and deprivation, what if we broke in favor of increased compassion for our fellow human? What if we funneled this energy into mutual aid, into helping each other survive — rather than choosing to perish at the hands of our masters?
A pathogen is ripping its way across the globe. But the ins and outs of COVID-19 are not important. It doesn’t matter that the young and healthy are left largely unscathed by this disease, doesn’t matter how this is transmitted or spread or whether or not it lives on packages for 12 hours or 24. What matters is our response. The faultlines that have been exposed by this damned virus are deep gashes, and the rich, the poor; the old, the young; the lucky, the unlucky, we all lie on opposite sides of the line.
We’re living through history, Alex told me on the phone last night. It would be exciting, if it weren’t so goddamn terrifying.
2. JOURNALISM STUFF
I spoke with organizer, teacher, union leader, podcast host, and all around gentleman Kenzo Shibata a few weeks ago when I was writing this, a letter to the AAPI community about why they should, and why so many members of it have already, endorsed Bernie Sanders. There was a snippet in our conversation about the time Bernie came to Kenzo’s union’s meeting and stirred everyone up; it was a moment that encapsulated Bernie’s potential to be “Organizer in Chief”.
Enjoy. (Sorry about the audio quality, this is Tape A Call. Future recordings should be much better.)
I also wrote about it on Twitter, in this thread.
Your song of the day is this because fuck it I love this song:
Hope you enjoyed today’s newsletter! Let me know what you think by responding to this email or, if you’re a paid subscriber, hitting reply all and commenting that way.
See you on Wednesday!