How did they do it?
How did every actor of civil disobedience, every day-hero and night-heroine who stood up and spoke out and was silenced and stood again and spoke again, every freedom fighter and writer and banned-book-distributor and school teacher and parent and activist, how did they do that? Day and day after night and night of this system they knew was not right, to fight. To be spit kicked whipped burned mocked raped shot mutilated torn stopped broken up dismissed, again and again and again, only to return to the march, to the papers, to the protest, until something changed.
All of them, all over the world, in every victory, in every battle, every jostle for justice.
Just...how, how did that courage, resilience, brilliance, whatever you can and do and should and will call it, stay, how did those human, human people do it?
Because I was sitting there in my "current issues in the international community", heated as fuck over feminism in global political economy, post colonial theories, debates, attitudes, and listening to these soothing solutions...open the markets, regulate the markets, increase intervention, just educate more women, just be more transparent, etcetcetc. It looked so easy. So simple. So clean, like the inside of this liberal institution of university, clean with chalkboards waiting and orderly desks and the occasional poster for moderate rallies, devoid of that heat. That grit. That motherfucking mess that's been made in and around this world.
And it sounded so much more universal and cleaner than it is, to do 1 2 and 3. Even when theory tried to get messy. It still boiled down simply. Ingredients.
The mess. Where is it? Why does no one seem to feel it, to hear it, pressing in on political systems and economic structures and financial "crises", a lingering and dangerous oppression? Why do these theories and rhetoric not have a pebble in their shoe every time they try and advocate for xyz market blah-blah...feel it in the shadows at night, some kind of haunting taste of legacy and injustice and the shittiness that continues and continues and continues because it's 'the system'? Because it's the only way we've known things and only way to know them. This 'system'.
So I'm wondering how
How did the people who fought and fought, how did they do it?
How do the people who fight and fight and see no change--how do they keep on?
Because it is such a difficult thing. There are always stones in my theoretical shoes, highly flammable ones, cuidado, and I want to believe it, I do, the 'it won't always be this way' bit. Because look how smooth and clean the solutions seem, "just do more fair trade". Listen to that.
Mm. MM. So sweet. Like cotton candy or iced tea.
Except even then. Even then, the things that don't seem to grate, don't seem inflamed with capitalist desire/ego/'human nature as self-interested-greedy', even then. Is it really reaching into the scarred heart and scooping out the ashes? Or else just adding a slightly more aesthetic scar to it all?
Fuck.
It's devastating.
To see something that should be enough of 'okay' but not be able to stand up completely. Because of a stone, in my shoe, in many, on the road, down the stairs, a stone called justice.
And wanting it. So badly. So, so badly to be out, to be here, to be present. to be EVERYWHERE. To not feel constantly this nagging reminder that it is not a just world. That it won't be, can never be, until we can all walk free and softly over a healing earth.
To take all the stones and build a circle, build a home, build a world that needs no invisible hands or axioms or Truths.
And so and so and so
No.
I can't. And I don't know how to balance the realities of "oh but this has to be the better way" and look what has been accomplished this way with my stupid kind of ideals that won't let me quit just because it 'looks' better. I am a little bit stuck in a spot of cynicism, wondering if enough can be done to change the system.
I want it to be better, to be some kind of just for the past and for the present and for the future, some kind of something fucking else than how it goes.
I will work every second of my life for that world. And I know it will not be, and everything will fall into the "good enough" of theory. fuck.
and-but this will be okay.
Because it will look at me with human faces and human hands that will tell me Kelly, look how far we've come. Look how we are doing. We are okay, we are getting there. We will make this system work for us. We will not let what was perpetuate into what will be.
And I won't have anything left to say because there is only so much patience and so many breaths in a lifetime to see change happen.
And maybe the only way to get through is to believe in the one, the one amongst the many, that changing one life or one policy or one treaty will be at least one step more than before.
Because I am overwhelmed to think of the alternative, that it will never be.
so i guess what they did, all they could do, was keep going.
-k
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