With Crisis Comes Clarity

With crisis comes clarity. The comfort of being at ease has the downsides of dulling the senses, slowing the reflexing, softening the mind. The absence of crisis, or the crisis being far enough away to be impersonal and of no immediate threat, is pleasing to the point of addiction. Of a high to be chased, a need to be met, an altered reality that must be maintained at all costs. Of using technology not as a funnel of information from a big, big world but as an umbrella to keep anything unpleasant from falling on your head like some unwelcomed existential rainstorm. The immense privilege of technology to manifest not only the full depth and breadth of human knowledge and live streaming of world events in real time, but also to filter and provide an off switch when that wider world becomes too much.

With crisis comes clarity. The folks to whom pillow shams not matching the curtains brings forth a violent rage of social media postings and demand for restitution from the universe for the wrong done upon them might — just might — have a story, or image, or video, or anecdote they heard tell of folks who have lost everything burn through their inane existence for a moment. Lost everything from family and friends both in separation and death, to their homes, their livelihoods, and then threatened with the loss of their country because an evil, powerful man they will never meet from far away deemed it to be so for reasons they will never fully understand. Human beings who a few weeks ago worried about dreams, goals, careers, sports, and the underappreciated daily minutiae that fills up life from sunrise to sunset find their thoughts replaced solely with the overwhelming and most basic human decision making process of fight or flight. The stark images of desperate people not only contrast to the peaceful lives of others far away but give lie to the overblown angst of daily dramas, amplified by a lack of more pressing matters.

With crisis comes clarity. Words and phrases start to mean something very different, or more precisely begin to mean what they should have meant all along before they were bastardized by convenience and social media trends. Terms like “fight” and “struggle” and “protest” so easily applied to anything at all that requires the slightest bit of effort start to pale against the knowledge that far from buzzwords optimized for search engines they are nomenclature for desperate acts by desperate folks desperate to live one breath longer. The performative versions of protest, the cries of fighting as a virtue unmoored from whether there is a just cause or not, a struggle of choice as opposed to one thrust upon the innocent, wilts in shame as the onanistic pursuits they are. Or they should wilt in shame, if such charlatans where capable of the sensation that keeps most functional adults between the lines of public behavior.

With crisis comes clarity. The duly elected leadership of a people struggling for survival, doggedly defying the dictator who rigs elections, murders dissidents, and oppresses his own people, press, and followers ought to bring into focus what is and is not proper leadership in a government. On the scales such evidence demands a verdict against the politics that ask not who could lead in a crisis, but who promises to give the right combination of constituencies the right amount of promises to obtain their financial and electoral support. We demand our elected leaders & institutions to be wholly reactionary to our whims of the moment, sensitive to the lightest breathed word of our longings, then we wonder and marvel at why those same supposed bulwarks against the bad of the world flinch at the mere hint of crisis. The seemingly regularly occurring habits of voting for the highest offices not on the merits of the candidates but on which would be the lesser of various and sundry bad choices. The unspoken and conceded point that picking between the lesser of two bad choices always results in picking something lesser, and then empowering that lesser with the trappings and power of office, which perpetuates and empowers the lesser thing until it becomes the norm. Thus, a free people meanders and justifies their own ever-lowering standards all the while wondering just what the hell happened and who is at fault. Probably why they don’t allow mirrors in voting booths; that level of reality would be dangerous.

With crisis comes clarity. We realize the great evils that envelop the world from time to time are usually preventable but rarely prevented. That today’s crises were yesterday’s shoulder shrugs, last year’s scoffs, and the last decade’s unthinkable. That the lessons of life that go unlearned always, without exception, eventually educate whether we like it or not. That reality isn’t as easy to ignore as resetting the filters on our social media. That our umbrellas of privilege won’t hold up under the steel rain of a madman’s unwavering ambition to kill, conquer, and control. That the impersonal problem of today, if left unattended, will become the very personal pain and struggle of tomorrow.

With crisis comes clarity. What will this crisis show of us?