Dark days

There was a moment, alone beside a canal in Oxford, in the summer of 2015, when the warm, humid breeze brought the scent of flowers and fruit and cut grass, along with birdsong and the murmur of the waters, and I thought to myself This is the Thing. 

I've spent years thinking about colonialism, how so many of the world's ills come from a structure of control meant to do... what exactly? To filter money to the top, so that elites could hold their slice of this feeling, of this calm and peace and abundance. 

I've lived in California most of my life, and never understood the desire for more land than you could enjoy, but then you could argue that California land will never have the same lushness of a place that gets, you know, regular water. To me, more of anything becomes more to be steward of. More fences to mend, more brush to clear, more life to tend and death to guide. I've always had a farmer's sensibilities for that. But I digress. 

Colonialism is at its core about greedily (insecurely?) taking more and more, at the expense of others, because you are afraid you won't get your share of the pleasure of life. Almost every other ill flows from this.

We're seeing the roots of a new system of slavery, aided and abetted by the online media, guided by cynical nihilist kleptocrats, and run by Christian Dominionists. They started by dismantling education and continued down a decades-long strategy from there. And yet, there are principles to this inhumane march that we are not quite acknowledging yet: That we no longer acknowledge anything like the sanctity of life; that anyone not white or Christian has no rights, and even among that privileged subset, only men should have the power to make decisions over the life and death of the people around them. All other people are to be food for the engines of commerce; while the tiny fraction of people in unjustly in control enjoy their lives, the rest of humanity exists to toil and breed and bleed to serve them. They want more people, but only more powerless people. The suffering of most for the pleasure of a few. It is the anti-Utilitarianism. 

They want us ignorant and fighting each other, distracted by struggles over who should be able to live their lives and to what extent, from the very real likelihood that this species will not survive the next century.

Because if we're all going to die, they who die with the most memories of pleasure "win".

We must not give up fighting, but we also must not stop taking pleasure in life, be it little or big.

The day after the Supreme Court shows its recent and extreme lack of legitimacy, we must understand - who cares how many people die from gun violence? Someone at the top is getting rich. Who cares how many women die? We will force them to make more.

I do not think the host - the United States of America - will survive this parasite.