My ten-year-old cousin asks me what a white Christmas is. She hasn’t really known any and she probably won’t. Buds are blooming in the middle of winter. The maple sap is already starting to flow. Animals come out of hibernation thinking it’s spring. But according to Monuncle, the next waves of floods, landslides, forest fires, heatwaves, tornadoes, violent storms, drought are not signs that we are on the verge of tipping over. Either way, technologies will save us, right? We know it well, the more Teslas there are, the less greenhouse gases there are, but the more new mines there are, the fewer children growing up in Rouyn-Noranda.
We’re counting down the New Year by popping champagne while we count down the children jumping in Gaza. Israel and oil companies have already divided up the Palestinian territory, ready to explode the people and the land for nothing. cash. And since you can’t extract oil from an inhabited city (there would be significant gas deposits off the coast of Gaza), apparently that justifies this massacre. Make no mistake, no country is really calling for more than a symbolic ceasefire. Exploiting people to privatize land and extract resources is the political routine of the “superpowers”. Capitalism is savage and it wages war on life.
Faced with oppression, we must rise up. But how can we organize ourselves if the first battle we fight is to survive until our next paycheck? It turns out that to make ends meet, some people have to steal from the grocery store. That’s just because of inflation, we are told, not the fault of the big food chains which are recording record profits. Dystopia isn’t in the newest Netflix movie your whole family is telling you to watch, it’s right in your face. It has become common practice that security guards protect self-service checkouts in neighborhood fruit stores. Sorry, food is a right reserved for hard-working people. Or at least, that’s the excuse you hear at your family dinner.
We are losing our right to transfer a lease at the hands of a Minister of Housing who sides with her landlord friends. No conflict of interest here, obviously. Gentrification builds luxury condos while a line of people wait to tour a $1,500 3 ½ full of mold. Sorry, housing is a right reserved for hard-working people. It’s easier to judge the individual than the system, because it doesn’t require you to take responsibility and mobilize yourself to get through it together.
We can lie to ourselves as much as we want, consciously decide to live in denial, close Instagram when the massacre videos are too difficult to watch, avoid looking at a homeless person on the street corner, but nothing happens. will stop this destructive machine. While artificial intelligence makes art, we must work to exist. Sorry, free time is a right reserved for robots. We must stop waiting for Jesus to come and save us, in any case he would be massacred on the holy land. But the holidays are over, so please don’t come and break the party. Can you, for once, not talk about difficult matters?
No, we can’t. This deep dissonance hides a dangerous immobility. It is, above all, a fatal slope towards murderous apathy. All exploitation is the representation of our intimate disconnection from the world, of our obvious incapacity to inhabit it together. Our souls crumble a little more each time a people is murdered, each time a neighborhood becomes gentrified, each time a bud blooms too early. This disconnection is not human. The community is the only valid response to all these wars which attack our very sensibilities. It is not too late to free ourselves from it.