Who Will We Become

If we get what we want

Photo by Dayne Topkin on Unsplash

“I’m like a dog chasing cars. I have no idea what I would do if I caught one.”
- The Joker

What if all our enemies were overcome?

What if all the people we claim to be fighting against stopped fighting us?

What if we got everything we want, peace, equality, clean air, support for the underprivileged, health care, living wages, the release of the Epstein files, what then?

We appear, more and more, to be defined by who we oppose.

Just as people who scream about wanting humanity to die off and the whole shit show to collapse, people who want all the things that we want have no idea what they would do if they got their wishes.

For a brief moment we did get what we wanted. It was during the early years of the ongoing pandemic. Everyone was being taken care of, there was money for food and rent, there was support from the government, people got to work from home, the air and water were cleaner, it was as close as most of us have come during our lives to having the world we wanted.

...and what did we do?

We fucking went crazy,

We couldn’t handle the “loneliness” of the lockdowns, we freaked out about our children being socially and emotionally stunted by having to stay home from school, we bought guns for protection, and dogs for companionship, we hoarded toilet paper, and the second the president told us the pandemic was over we abandoned any sense of caring for one another and went mad with consumption, doubling down on all the horrible things we were doing before the virus came.

For some reason insanely loud, huge trucks, muscle cars, and motorcycles were everywhere and people were driving faster and more dangerously than before, rents skyrocketed, grocery prices went higher and higher and societal division became physically dangerous as factions rallied behind their beliefs.

So, rather than becoming who we thought we would become, we got worse.

We stopped caring about everyone and everything that we had claimed to support.

We abandoned the disabled.

We abandoned our children.

We abandoned rational behavior.

We then embraced performative protests to, perhaps, assuage our guilt.

We chose to ignore the continued threat of the virus.

We chose to ignore any, but the most superficial aspects of change.

We got what we claimed to want and it blew us apart.

We wanted change but we couldn’t handle change.

We had no idea what to do with change.

We had no idea what we would do if we got what we wanted.

We had the only opportunity we were going to get to make real change and we squandered it, and now we’re paying the price for that.