Thoughts on this election day
As our belief in objectivity erodes, what can we create from the surreality of 2020?
Somewhere in the dissonance between the lull of quarantine and the hyperactive news cycle, the sheer farce of vitriolic politics set against the serenity of so many neighbors planting gardens and engaging in mutual aid, the smoke from the fires, the rain from the storms, dates and times meaning less, the hologram of digital communication, and the chronic nausea of watching our governing institutions corrode, this year has been feeling pretty damn surreal.
I say surreal not only in the sense of weird or dreamlike, but in the rising feeling that I’m walking through a Salvador Dali painting: dripping clocks as time and reality melt around me, and less and less ability to take “reality” at face-value.
Ours is an era of objectivity eroding. No longer does the news feel like some safe, stable, soothing voice of Walter Cronkite. The sense many of us lived under that the ground beneath our feet, from elections to institutions to social interactions to the economy, was somehow unshakeable and stable — that sense is resolutely gone. It feels like we’re standing on water.
And that’s a good thing.
