Sometimes numb

Well, yes, I am con­vinced there are more than two.

There is the real world. The scent of pine. Sea­sons. Foot and hoof prints. Bricks and mor­tar. Heart­burn. Bird­song and but­ter­fly wings. Thun­der. The cir­cle of life. The un­de­ni­able.

Then there is the gross world. Fic­tion fus­ing with fact. So­ci­ety an ever-dark­en­ing soap opera. The line be­tween truth and tosh a be­wil­der­ing blur.

Third, there is the three-day world. Deaf­en­ing noise. The spin. The rush. More and more peo­ple no longer able to process, lis­ten, feel, react. So much crush, clat­ter and clam­our, like a colony of hun­gry gan­nets, where Machi­avel­lians have re­alised they can say and do what­ever they want, know­ing that in three days it will not be news any­more. It may not even have pro­voked a shrug in the first place.

I am some­times numb. Are you?

There is a creep­ing, de­press­ing care­less­ness, a dire risk of em­pow­er­ing pop­ulists, be­cause we are drown­ing in a stag­ger­ing flood of cru­cial in­for­ma­tion, bla­tant lies, nar­cis­sism and pop­ulist op­por­tunism.

Blue is ac­tu­ally red. Re­ally? What­ever.

Eu­rope is a Fas­cist state. Britain is Great! What­ever.

Morally the most pow­er­ful man on Earth is con­spic­u­ously bank­rupt. What­ever.

Those videos of vi­o­lence? Ac­tu­ally it was those hold­ing the sticks who were suf­fer­ing. What­ever.

We are saw­ing off the branch on which we stand. What­ever. What­ever. What­ever.

I hon­estly don’t know what is next. Our so­cial and eco­log­i­cal predica­ment is so acute. But I do know that the ma­jor­ity of peo­ple, if they can bear to talk about it, un­der­stand this and strug­gle with the sense of help­less­ness. It is sick­en­ing to dwell on it, un­der­stand­ably. I apol­o­gise for mak­ing you dwell on it now.

I strug­gle. Per­haps that is ob­vi­ous. Some days I sink.

For me, re­silience grows on days of kind, de­ter­mined re­sis­tance, not of my mak­ing but of those around me.

Raul is 87. We share the same birth­day, Sep­tem­ber 21. He, like my dili­gent and for­ever op­ti­mistic fa­ther, will not bow or de­sist. Raul has coped with a crip­pled hand since an ac­ci­dent in child­hood. He tends his huge veg­etable gar­den for his whole fam­ily. He keeps bees which alone is defin­ing. He of­fers help with­out the blink of a bright eye. He of­fers a smile like a bird would a song. He has just planted 200 olive trees.

Good peo­ple abound. No doubt you are one among the many. We just need to say no to all the non­sense, not let the shal­low tor­rent wash away the deep foun­da­tions that are rea­son, right, fam­ily, com­mon­wealth and democ­racy. And na­ture, the del­i­cate bal­ance that hangs. It is ar­guably our great­est shame.

We can ill af­ford to be care­less with any of them now. We must re­sist those that are and be truth­ful to their faces.