This Is Not Your Ordinary Apocalypse
From watching the Bubonic Plague decimate your society, to being a man one day and chattel the next in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, to watching a nation implode on the fields of Gettysburg, it’s clear that the world has ended many times over. The rise and fall of fascism, as well as the invention of nuclear weapons, seemed to push the planet back to the brink in the 20th century, yet those “world-ending” disasters seem like blips in the rear view mirror at this point. More recently, and comically, the year 2012 was the due date for Armageddon. No moment is more terrifying than the present, and through it all, humankind has persevered. This resilience may help to explain our complete inaction towards climate change, as a mixture of denial, frustration and a kind of arrogance, one that simply can’t imagine an Earth without humanity.
Naomi Klein, in her 2014 book “This Changes Everything,” succinctly described the experience of walking around a college campus in 2019. An excerpt from the introduction reads, “All we have to do is not react as if this is a full-blown crisis. All we have to do is keep on denying how frightened we actually are. And then, bit by bit, we will have arrived at the place we most fear, the thing from which we have been averting our eyes. No additional effort required.”
For all that is made of student activism on college campuses, there’s still a general exuberance that exists at my largely liberal state school. It’s a mood that’s accompanied by an expectation of the post-graduate prospects that our parents experienced in their twenties. Many of us are children of Baby Boomers or the first wave of Gen X, so the idea that the future we’re entering is more or less sustainable still exists. This intrinsically positive outlook in a world after the wars, economic crashes, and revelations of the still young 21st century must be what they call “American exceptionalism,” if it means anything at all.
Since my family hails from the Caribbean, all notions of long moral arcs towards justice have been put to bed long ago. Some of my classmates who haven’t faced similar disillusionments are realizing that capital doesn’t care about them for the first time. This demeaning underbelly to a more general idealism may be best represented by the awareness that one of the best ways for a brand to market themselves online is to feign depression. Once an approach towards life is so pervasive in American life that massive corporations can integrate it into their outreach efforts, then it’s clearly a poorly kept secret. This weighs on me the hardest, oddly enough, when sitting in Music History.
Walking through Western artistic, political, and social history can be draining when the measures taken to preserve that tradition counted lives as collateral damage. It’s useful knowledge, but when analyzing Purcell or Puccini’s importance, it’s easy to remember that any answer pales in comparison to the spoils of Western hegemony — whether it be global anti-blackness, ecological degradation, or both. It’s hard not to ask: was it all worth it?
The question is equal parts exhausted, accusatory, and sardonic. It’s a bloodied Miles Davis in 1959, unflinchingly staring into the camera while standing next to an NYPD officer. It’s Marvin Gaye singing “Is that enough?” to Anna Gordy, decrying the same thing those wary of the climate are — that we will have to pay. It’s dark amusement, a trick to play on yourself to help pass the time. Yet, even if there’s no suitable answer, asking the question has done me a great deal of good by forcing me to think clearly about a different vision of the world. If there’s any time to find a different framework for life on the planet, it’s now.
In the summer of 1997, roughly a year from my birth, Jacques Derrida sat down and had a discussion with free jazz icon Ornette Coleman. As to be expected, the conversation ranged from the artistic to the political. At one point, Derrida asked Coleman if he thought his role as an artist should “have an effect on the state of things?” Coleman responded with a story about time spent early in his career when he played saxophone out of identification with the oppression of African Americans in the South. Eventually, he felt like giving up since he only saw himself contributing to larger, ongoing suffering, and he told this to his mother. Ornette Coleman’s mother rebutted his intention with a question, one that I ask myself instead of wallowing in despair. She asked, “What’s got hold of you, you want somebody to pay for your soul?”
