Notes: I’ll be at Aesop in Pitt St, 7pm tomorrow night, in-conversation with Nevo Zisin, as part of their incredible Queer Library giveaway. Come along for a free book!
On Thursday night, I’ll also be at the Sydney Opera House as part of Sydney WorldPride. The queer lit double bill is two events, a panel called Mixed Metaphors, that I’ll be on with Patrick Lenton and Madeleine Gray, followed by On Queer East Asian Pride with Jason Om and Benjamin Law. Get your tix now!
Do you ever wonder if we’ll ever be able to live without these crises, without the endless bigotries and prejudices wielded by the powerful to keep us divided while they ride us into not only our graves but the grave of civilisation? In the midst of massive unnatural disasters, wave after wave of history-breaking fires and floods and plagues, we are being belted over the head daily by militant anti-trans anti-queer rhetoric, as if the choices people make over their gender and how they express it are actually worthy of this kind of lethal hysteria—this is an old tactic, one that aims to take the energy of real frustrations and fears which are aimed at the ruling class, and aim it instead at vulnerable marginalised communities. Spend yourselves here, they say, on this group we’ve designated disposable, destroyable. Meanwhile, our means of communication are owned by billionaires and all attempts to “speak truth to power” or build a genuine movement that can shift us off this suicidal societal trajectory is fractured, muddled, suppressed.
Daily, the discourses we’re mired in are resolutely dull, insipid, ridiculous. There isn’t a single “problem” issue that doesn’t have a reasonable answer, answered many years ago, but we are not in the business of solutions, or reason, we are in the business of spectacle, of endless “conversations” or “debates”, and if these debates should encourage certain stigmatised communities be attacked, well, that’s unfortunate but so normalised we all just keep chugging on, right? Increasingly, it seems that ruin is our present and our inevitable future. Who among us is doing the work of imagining another way? (Trust that it cannot be any group or corporation currently embedded in power.)
What would it look like if we were all engaged, daily, in the work of avoiding climate catastrophe? If we had a universal basic income, and took the planting of trees, the cleaning of oceans and rivers and waterways, the restructuring and reformation of cities into green places, as our most urgent task, worthy of our every effort? What would it look like if we had a society that had care, for each other, and for the ecosystem, at its heart?
We are stuck in place, frozen with dread and horror and exhaustion. This is by design. The ruling class, like every ruling class before them, is insane. I don’t have any other word for it, sorry. All they can do is what they have done every day: maintain their power at all costs, even when “all costs” includes society itself. They really believe they can survive no matter what, or else that there’s no point in even trying to change, because the outcome is fixed. Either way, the future is being killed by a fatalistic nihilism, a psychopathic insularity.
I’m so tired, but I have a baby, a gorgeous wide-eyed infant, and so I am not allowed to be tired, not allowed to be apathetic. I felt this way before his arrival of course, but it’s undeniable that his presence has renewed the urgency within me. I want him to have a future, inshallah, and so I know I must resist the conditioned apathy. What should my resistance look like? How can I love and be loving with capitalism’s boot on my neck, my body and mind wearied to the point of agony? I’m not certain of anything except that I must try.
Salaam,
Omar