unleashing alternative futures: pre-existing conditions
18 Jun 202218 june 2023
the warnings started last spring. slow. i remembered thinking that i really hated the news. consistently too much emphasis on the wrong stuff, not enough emphasis on the stuff that truly matters, and zero emphasis on what to actually do about anything. endless cycles of emotional spiraling. i remember thinking that bad news media should be a crime. but it’s much too late for that.
last year, i saw a tweet about covid that fucked me up.
and i didn’t really know what to do. so i just sat and felt. and it didn’t feel good.
i remember having the same conversation with several friends: how long do you have to be in pain all of the time in order to start claiming “chronic pain”? how much limited ability do you have to have to begin calling yourself disabled? those convos made me think: how weak does your immune system have to be to consider having a weakened immune system? is having had covid a pre-existing condition now?
and then the early warnings started to come about california (and danger seasons in general): heat. drought. wildfires. power outages.
and then a shitton of cows died in kansas.
and then… after ALL of the january 6 dust up, DJT still ran for president. he didn’t win, but he did a great job at the one thing he does best: distracting people from shit that actually matters. we spent so much time trying to keep him out of office that we missed our last big public moment to shift our collective energy around the climate. and by fall, everyone was feeling it. everyone.
those first 2,000 dead cows? they kept dying. and then the meat shortages began. the vegans were ready. they had done the emotional labor of giving up meat long ago. but all the carnivores who felt a meal wasn’t complete without meat, they freaked. their emotional stores worn thin from covid (turns out ignoring covid takes just as much energy as dealing with it), they flipped out.
tons of californians who were already on the verge of moving east, did it. the great u.s. climate migration begun and we weren’t even close to ready…
words / writing / post-processing
353w / 12min / 10min