DMB Digest: Don't worry, be sad.
Partisan chaos monsters, get off my lawn!
Don’t worry, things are worse than you think.
And that’s a good thing. Why? Because when people say, “Things are bound to get worse before they get better” you want to be closer to the better part than the worse part. And, in fact, I think we are slogging our way straight through the thick of “worse” currently.
The tipping point comes when a culture collectively determines everything is not okay but is actually quite terrible. At which point, people are able to stop paddling against the current and determine to hold on for dear life. Then bingo bango, you pop out the other side soon after. Now of course this analogy doesn’t serve to comfort all the people who will fall off the raft and drown during the worst-of-the-worse rapids. For those people, the survivors are left with the responsibility to drag the river, recover their bloated corpses, and do their best to never repeat the mistakes that led to their annihilation.
Ehem, but I get ahead of myself. For there to be any survivors of our American Way at all, we must band together for one critical practice before it’s too late.
Welcome to the season of lamentation. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, allow me a brief definition: lamentation is the practice of accepting some degree of responsibility for all the bull$#!t going on around you and grieving for the loss of what could have been. Okay, so now I beg you to allow me an extended definition.
If you are still operating under the assumption that everything is going great, I suppose you should tune me out. I recommend plugging your eyes with your fingers and repeating, “lalala, I’m not reading.” If you’re still reading, the next step toward healthy lamentation is accepting some degree of responsibility for how messed up things are. If you remain in a place of, “I told you so! I told you all this would happen, but noooo! You just had to go and blow it all to hell!” in a diatribe worthy of Charlton Heston, then you remain no good to anyone. Blaming everyone but yourself might feel good for a while, but in the end it only contributes to the downward spiral into chaos. And unless you’ve intentionally chosen the path of chaos monster (which plenty in our society have), I advise against such behavior.
Once you find yourself asking rhetorical questions such as, “How have we gotten here?” Or “What have we done?” you’ve arrived at the place of lamentation. Now, if you find yourself sitting on the floor chanting “darkness is my only friend” for minutes at a time, you’ve gone too far. You should have exited about three exits back. Floor-chanting is the place we will all end up soon enough if we lack the ability to lament in a healthy manner. But with a little hard work, we can avoid the “darkness is my only friend” stage of societal collapse.
Lamentation is a hinge point practice that brings with it the power to reverse corporate behavior, but only if it is practiced corporately. When enough people 1) acknowledge my country has come to a bad place, and 2) me and my tribe have played a part, and 3) I’m broken up about it, then in the midst of that lamentation we will look around and acknowledge each other. We’ll notice there are others and that their fingers of accusation have been retracted.
Our lamentation becomes a beachhead of common ground. Our grief inspires a new vision. Others catch on. The beachhead against the chaos expands. But, I must repeat, new gains come only through the acknowledgment of loss. That’s what it means to lament. To grieve. The America that could have been is dead and gone. We destroyed it. There is no getting it back. There is no “undo button.”
Chaos agents will attempt to convince you the way back to greatness is through power, violence, upheaval and more chaos. “You must crush your enemies beneath your feet and grind them into dust! Only then will we rise from the ashes!” These people would soon have you rocking yourself on the floor, smudges of charcoal beneath your eyes, curtains drawn, chanting (you guessed it) “darkness is my only friend.”
Oppression and chaos never lead to peace and order. Anyone who claims they do is not your friend. Through the painful practice of corporate lamentation we can start again (minus all our compatriots that will drown along the way). Moving forward, instead of flying partisan banners or espousing divisive slogans, I say we begin to publicly state, “I grieve” by posting a sad face, greyscale emoji.
Let this be the unifying symbol of lament our world needs to reveres our tilt into chaos and destruction.
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