A hurricane has landed, but it’s hard to notice. The Republican National Convention is dominating national headlines, perhaps because people are interested to see how our political parties are going to respond to the uprising, which is itself a response to COVID-19 and years of police brutality and centuries of capitalism. In California, people are more worried about the massive fires, made worse by the inability to use prison labor because of COVID-19. In cities across the country, people are more worried about how the uprising and economic downturn due to COVID-19 are affecting their psychic and physical landscape.
So Hurricane Laura, a category 4 storm and the largest to hit the United States this year, will probably never make the front page news for most people. Hurricane Laura has been eclipsed by the hurricane of our social breakdown. What happens when we can’t see each others’ trauma because our own is so central, and visceral? What I’m seeing, in calls with friends and family, is increasing denial that anything bad is even happening at all, likely because people feel increasingly powerless to do much about the increasingly supercharged collapse of everything comforting they’d built their lives around. So it’s now that much easier for those in power to reconfigure memory and reality, since everyone is so desperate to cling to whatever false promises of safety and progress are thrown their way. I suppose this is how institutions like capitalism and patriarchy have always reproduced themselves, but it’s stunning to witness in real time.
i wonder what we
will call this land after the
uprising succeeds