White-laced traces in a web
My generation is vulnerable. I realize that now, more than ever.
We are the children of those who celebrated May ’68, we were raised by parents who had actively lived the climax of a civilization shedding its old chains. The sky was the limit and everything was flower-power and free love and peace for all. Anything was possible, everything was allowed.
We were raised with the idea that girls are in no way less valuable than boys, and that you can be anything or anyone you want to be.
We were raised on milk and honey, during the longest ever spell of peace this corner of the world has ever known.
In school we were taught things would only get better from now on.
Evolutions concerning women’s rights, the LGBTQ emancipation and other social changes seemed to confirm this. The climate crisis, however, spoiled the party: the wealth on which our (grand)parents’ generation had built its imperium, proved too greedy. The ice floe we are living on, is melting as we speak, and the number of people truly appreciating the seriousness of the situation is frustratingly small.
Just as confronting to see, is how the old ghosts of male supremacy, white Christianity and other fossile ways of thinking are back from never having been dead.
Of course we realized some old ideas can be tenacious. But the scope of what is happening, is frightening.
The game is being played in a cunning way, by men who know exactly which buttons to push and wounds to probe in order to gain more power. The rest of us are standing there, watching them do it — in blissfully ignorant adoration, or in growing fear.
A nuanced and refined discourse has no argument against the brute force of a bludgeon.
We are no stronger than the dusty traces of seeds, I though, caught in the old web of a spider, for as long as it will last. One gust of wind, and they are gone again.
Then the storm came.
And afterwards, it was suprisingly hopeful to see how well the web had weathered it. Carrying a bit less pappus, sure. But intact, nonetheless.
And by next spring, the soft abundance of white-laced seeds will cruise through the air again, unhindered.
I guess perhaps fragile things are not so easily defeated, after all.
