VOGUE copyright Conde Nast
© 2020 h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com
© 2020 KM Fikes
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from KM Fikes is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to KM Fikes & h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. No excerpt or link may be used for monetary compensation.
Feel free to read with Tchaikovsky's Sugar Plum FAIRY Suite playing in the background. Personally dig the oboe here as it comes in like Gladys-Knighted Pip. Safest Season's Greets...
The top lunatic contenders were - ostensibly - Senator Bernie Sanders' Medicare
for All, businessperson Andrew Yang's Universal Basic Income and
motivational author/speaker Marianne Williamson's early mention of
African-American Reparations. Much of the demos scoffed.
2020 laid bare mad
genius by dusting cobwebs off common sense. The need for comprehensive health
coverage during a pandemic became too condescending to consider
self-explanatory. The lunacy was no longer in a socialist-suspicious policy
proposal but in the inane custom of tying medical access to employment. Apparently, we required the lesson of who is 'essential' to our economy and
none, ironically enuf, sat in the boardrooms - no longer union halls - that chronically decide our fate.
For those who still chuckle at Mr. Yang, one wonders if they were too amused to
cash their Stimulus check. And/or hope for another.
The candidate who slid into
silly base embraced Reparations as an extension of her ethos. Oh so long ago.
She preached atonement and framed Reparations as a nation's natural 'reckoning'.
Further, her call for sum'in as airy-fairy as consciousness stood in unnerving
contrast to a White-House-turned-Black-Hole where nuttin' escapes the
gravitational pull: "alternative facts" - like time - slow whilst any 'light' is
sucked thru this mysterious cosmic straw where moral fiber does not fray nor
snap but simply eviscerates. Ethical cores stretch past recognition into what
astrophysicists actually term, 'spaghettification'. Alas, 'twas Williamson who served as the noodle on a Democratic stage.
The ideas deemed least were
needed the most this year of years. 20/20 vision - like the lens click of an
ophthalmologist: Clearer here? Or here? One. Or Two? This practice of clarity to
refine our 'gaze' was thrust upon America's collective myopia.
Now is not the
time.
Now would be too much to ask; all in due course.
White 'allied'
preachers spoke thus to MLK. Contrary to the most recent commercial film's
exorbitantly generous depiction, Harriet Tubman's husband was not supportive
of her desire to flee - gaslighting her resolve with the limitations of her
disability - 'spells', as they were. Black Lives Matter activists were nigh
terrorists by popular discourse the day before a state knee squeezed out the last
breath from George Floyd.
A standard Snellen vision testing chart from the 1950s.
American Academy of Ophthalmology
That was Lens One. Click to Lens Two: BLACK LIVES
MATTER placards on upper-middle-class (erstwhile-Red-Lined-currently-gentrified) lawns was the only - oddly - apropos
response. Not Obama's translation of Cesar Chavez' "Si, se puede". Because "can"
is not - and never will be - the immediate 'matter' of must.
This GenX Northern
Californian well recalls the national AIDS crises of the nineties with apathetic
policy abandoning our sick and dying. Likely not Marianne Williamson's memory
as she chose not to ignore in lieu of her activism to found Project Angel Food.
That was Lens One. Click to Lens Two: Whom amongst us could have fathomed AIDS
survivors (albeit still disproportionately representative of a privileged class
within the LGBTQIA+ community) - still positive - standing healthy as whole,
traversing long lines wrapped around San Fran's City Hall for marriage licenses -
preceding the nation's Supreme Court tardiness by years.
Speaking of one's
beloved region, our latest fire disaster began with mythological lightning. Ay,
change, gentlesoulfolk, happens in an almost-otherworldly flash. Or lens click -
correcting vision. Granted, grassroots labor pounds each nail into the rusted
tracks so that Change can choo choo to meet its moment. That moment though?
Decades, if not centuries, of preparation - oft in the form of mortal sacrifice -
set the groundwork for the otherwise miraculous instant to hit the ground
running. The baton (or hammer) can be dropped and recovered but rue the generation who
forfeits their own ride.
Substantive change is rarely convenient and those who
imagine it can ever be neat n' tidy in ideal time frames must have missed Tarana
Burke's MeToo Movement not exactly upend but stick a prick in the overinflation
of patriarchy's underbelly. Why the term 'jab' waited for COVID vaccines
boggles the mind. Sum'in shifted; a population rose when Adam's Rib poked the whole cage. Then again, misogyny
cannot be inoculated so perhaps 'jab' would have only stung realistic
sensibilities. One intentionally types "sensibilities" rather than 'expectations' because the point here is that expectations are set to be toppled
with outcomes even better. Let us beckon results to blindside. And dazzle.
What does the ballet brutal that was 2020 bode for 2021 and any time that
might be lent us beyond? My good peops, there be but one lens of recourse: bold as hell and gracious as heaven! Submitting relevance to face rejection on a sugar-coated platform, eliminating themselves from serious consideration to plum cabinet prospects, (vision)airy-fairy candidates took flight - offering survival 'dust'. Shunned. [Cue the oboe.] Williamson, Yang, and Sanders now stand not in the vicinity of a Presidential podium. Their ideas tho'? Forged a pandemic response plausible. Once diagnosed far-sighted yet proven near, their imagination rippled right into reality before a President-Elect could confer said status. For the love of all things evolving, Biden is, well...he is what is 'left' us. To
lead a transformation. At a juncture in a democracy fantastically fragile. Thencefo', what does conscious citizenship involve/demand/dare? Maybe some magical 'poof' of provocation. Relentlessly - as if the nation depends upon thy rabble-rebel-rousing. Fo' sho' seems so. The mind's eye of (vision)airy-fairies doth not tip-toe; it flits to n' fro. Should we trap dragonflies' glow in a jar, allowing the Biden/Harris administration to inch in
incremental-Obama-regression? Or might we break the seal with lil' mo' than combustive "twinkle, twinkle", cracking, if not shattering - less symbolic and more structural - glass ceilings? Might we insist upon striding ahead by perhaps
ignoring that 2021 is not marked by February's calendar and can still be a year
to leap?
Winter Solstice is upon us - the season honoring restorative
hibernation. We spent the better part of 2020 sheltering. Already. Only then,
we shivered in fear. Each season's purpose, howe'er, should be holistically
honored: "reap, sow, turn, turn". Consequently, this winter, gather thy
strength. Pause at the enormity of loss that our po' coddled culture seems
ill-equipped to see straight. For ev'ry life past? Blink. Thru most reverent
tears for it is only that welling up with the dignity of grief that justifies a
blurry eye. Fall asleep weeping. Let dreams be haunted by how much we fail.
Awake.
Press on; rise high. Make the mass exit worthy of our remain. In one
(vision)airy-fairy New Year.
a clever as compassionate critique
on the implausibility
of POSTness
Til our next 'post', feast upon produce in season...
© 2020 KM Fikes
© 2020 h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from KM Fikes is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to KM Fikes & h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. No excerpt or link may be used for monetary compensation.
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