Where's Our Monkey

We need monkeys too.

Photo by Juan Rumimpunu on Unsplash

By now you’ve, no doubt, heard about the monkey who shut down Sri Lanka. This brings up a question for all the activists and “monkey wrenchers” out there, what’s up?

If a monkey can do it, why can’t we?

Seriously, it’s a fricking monkey.

There have been people protesting all over the country attempting to convince themselves that they are going to change things, and a monkey shuts down a whole country.

You’re off your game.

Either we bring in some monkeys or you folks need to step it up some.

“So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark-that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.”
―Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

…and now a little more than five years later,

Nate Bear

echoes those same sentiments about the early COVID years.

“Here’s some of the objectively very good things that happened during early covid, things in many cases without precedent.
Direct cash transfers to citizens.
Evictions banned in the US, UK, EU.
Debt collection banned.
Homeless people provided shelter. (The UK ended homelessness).
Child poverty halved to record lows.
Food poverty eradicated. The US government was giving out free food boxes for fucks sake.
Plummeting suicide rates, adult and child.
Wildlife without the boot of industrial capitalism on its neck flourished.
Remote work was normalised.
These policies happened broadly across the west, regardless of the government type. From the right in the UK to the centre in Canada to the left in Spain. The US did redistribution and social protection under Trump and then Biden and at the state level, red and blue.
The crisis provoked a pro-social response independent of government ideology.
There was also a true sense of the collective, a true understanding that we lived in a society for the first time in my life. From mutual aid efforts to clapping for workers to wearing masks in healthcare as a basic courtesy to disabled and vulnerable people.”

We had our moment, and we squandered it with petty bickering, infighting, and anger, all at the behest of the corporate overlords who rule the country.

We bought into every lie, every rampaging pundit, and every capitalist attack that was shoved down our throats.

…and now we’re here, balanced precariously at the edge of a cliff, there’s nowhere to go but down to be dashed to pieces, and where our bloody broken bodies will litter the rocks, and it won’t just be people who fought against the lies, it will be everyone.

Everyone who believed and everyone who didn’t.

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I was in San Francisco last weekend and I had a thought, how much fun would it be to buy an old beater car that runs, don’t register it, and then zoom around the city smashing, bumper car like, into all the WayMo cars.

I wonder if the cars would freak out, or if they would start to talk to each other and attempt to stop the crazy person from knocking them around.

If anyone’s interested, feel free to take this idea and run with it, we could call it NoMoWayMo.

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