Things only have the value we give to them. And likewise, actions can be worth whatever we decide them to be worth.
It’s hard to be gentlemanly when the world isn’t being particularly gentle with you.
But if you can’t be a gentleman, you can at least not be a creep.
I watched it rain the blood of a dying god. I crawled through tar that took the faces of the people I had loved. It took them. Their blood became black ink.
She knelt, then began the first of the thirteen ritual prayers. Now, if you think my description of her preparations took a while, that’s intentional. It might help you understand—in the slightest way—Yumi’s life. Because this wasn’t a special day, in terms of her duties. This was typical. Ritual eating. Ritual bathing. Ritual dressing. Ritual prayers. And more. Yumi was one of the Chosen, picked at birth, granted the ability to influence the hijo, the spirits. It was an enormous honor among her people. And they never let her forget it.
If that should occur, the future of North America and Europe may look a lot like the present of Brazil and Mexico, with nepotistic oligarchies clustered in a few swollen metropolitan areas surrounded by hinterlands that are derelict, depopulated, and despised. What Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), with its managers in skyscrapers and its oppressed factory workers underground, was for an earlier industrial era, Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013), with its sybaritic elite in orbit and its desperate earthbound slum-dwellers, might prove to be for the era that succeeds neoliberalism—a prophecy in the form of a nightmare.
Only power can check power. Only a major reassertion of the political power, economic leverage, and cultural influence of national wage-earning majorities of all races, ethnicities, and creeds can stop the degeneration of the US and other Western democracies into high-tech banana republics. To supplement conventional electoral politics, reformers will need to rebuild old institutions or build new ones that can integrate working-class citizens of all origins into decision-making in government, the economy, and the culture, so that everyone can be an insider.
Reconstructing democratic pluralism in North America and Europe to permit cross-class power sharing is a challenge as difficult as it is urgent. The alternative is grim: a future of gated communities and mobs led by demagogues at their gates.
“Love is real.A tangible thing you can run your fingers over, warm and safe.Obsession is living a fantasy in your head, over and over again.Obsession is living in a nightmare, but never wanting to wake up.”
