Finding Our True North

The election has been over for a week. We can — and have — all returned to our regularly scheduled lives. We go to school. We go to work. We check our emails and our Facebook pages and our Twitter feeds for updates in the lives of our collectable friends and our favorite stalk-able celebrities. We consume. We consume some more. We breed and then consume again, ad nauseam into the next generation.

And to what end? What purpose does it all serve? Absurdist philosophy dictates that it doesn’t matter how one gets to the “meaning” in their lives as long as they’re searching, but it seems instead that we’ve all just… stopped.

There are no more searches for meaning in the daily life of the average Homo sapiens. We are like ants, shuffling back and forth between our work and our homes, work and homes, work and homes — we make money for the “queen” ants, our bosses, and in return we get a steady stream of meager wages, never enough to pay for what we need, and yet… always too much to complain about.

For a year, the political fire of the nation has been burning brightly. It started with Occupy Wall Street. An ember from the massive embroglio in the Middle East known as the Arab Spring landed in Zuccotti Park on Sept. 17, 2011, and for a moment, it seemed as though the people were inspired. Everyday folk I talked to about the protesters seemed to actually care for a moment, like something had poked through their gray numbness and was providing a tiny, yet vital peephole into a dangerous world full of vibrant colors.

Then the black batons of America’s militarized police came crashing down, and the peephole was closed. That insurrectionary energy was transferred to electoral politics, the deadpool of activism and thought. Diminished, it was instructed to get behind two men who couldn’t be more antithetical to the concept it came from. Both candidates paid lip service to the slogans being shouted in urban parks across the U.S., in their own special ways, yet never made even the slightest indication that, if they were president, they would actually do anything about the financial institutions that sent the world’s economy into a tailspin.

Of course this is roughly how things have always gone. By mid-year the subject changed, the camps were eradicated and what remained of the first truly coherent populist left movement in the United States in longer than I’ve been alive was scattered. The incumbent and his challenger, an elderly, wealthy Mormon with a penchant for beating humanoid robots at “worst human impersonation ever,” were finally able to get down to the “core issues” — like whether we should take Big Bird off the dole or not — and let the American people know just how much the latter loves their country while the former is a dirty <fill in the blank> who hates jobs.

Where are we now? In roughly the same boat we were in on Nov. 5. Nothing has changed, and while I choose to remain optimistic, things will probably get worse. We let our fetish for voting get in the way of getting things done. And now we have a president who not only won’t close Guantanamo Bay — he’s starting to renege on LGBT marriage rights and he’s still totally okay with allowing the Keystone XL pipeline to extend through the Midwest like a big cancerous vein pumping pure climate change-causing poison.

UCO — America — we need to get our act together. We need to start reconnecting with ourselves and our neighbors, creating relationships that extend past our nuclear family structure, away from our comfort zones, and into goals and causes that not only fulfill us, they make things better for other people as well. We need to realize — as ordinary people in New York realized, when FEMA and the Red Cross failed — that we are the ones with the true power. That there’s not a State or a company big enough to fully manage us forever. We made waves once; we can do it again, for everyone’s sake, and our own sakes.

And if I know anything, I know this: I may not love it right now (or ever), but I sure as hell am not going to leave it.

Love and kisses.