In the days before…
Photo by James Wheeler on Unsplash
So we’re having a Dogwood Spring some would say here in this part of the world. Early in the morning the ground frosts the edges of leaves and the bright taste of the cool air catches at memories of times passed.
Around us, despite our human scampering and musing, nature still does what it does so far, although some say it won’t always. The point would be right now, just for the moment, it does what it does.
We linger in its benevolence and its grace. It watches us with our madness of wars and politics and busy-ness. It wants us to full-fall into its fields and feel the growing beneath and around us reaching to summer and the soft winds it brings. It does not want us sad or mad or hurting… it is as an old person asking for our time. A little time. Just a little time away from the distractions that crease trails in our foreheads. Away from the technology that squeezes the lifeblood out of us. It wants to laugh with us again. It wants to tell us its stories. Stories that stretch so far back we can’t imagine. For we are just children on an old land bartering our lives for another day.
Some of us are older children than others. Our memories are longer. We remember what is no longer. And it is hard to explain this now when the frames of reference have been cracked and broken. When the span of memory is shortening. So much so that even we are forgetting. But we mustn’t forget. We must remember so that the future can catch the past and reawaken what once was. In the days before the psychopaths.
In the days before the psychopaths arrived we had the charity of hope and the grace of compassion and the gift of humour and a future we might have understood. We strived in the span of history for the good, to rectify, to reconcile, to compensate for the bad. Justice. Love. Truth. Peace. Tolerance. Charity. Even as crazy as the world seems right now perhaps those ideals before the psychopaths were even more utopian than what the artificial future proffered to us is now with all its soulless technology.
But we were in fact, making headway. We protested wars instead of gendered bathrooms. We protested totalitarianism instead of embracing it. We believed in the content of character rather than the colour of skin. We never believed in bringing others down to build ourselves up. Were we smarter or were we simply naive?
When the psychopaths arrived en masse (because of course there have always been psychopaths)—oh maybe they are sociopaths or narcissists or whatever you choose to label them, we learned somehow that Justice was in fact selective, Love was only expressed through hatred of the other, Truth was subjective, Peace warranted war and Tolerance was just a meaningless word. We learned that ends justified means no matter what the cost to the spirit of humans. And in the time of psychopaths we have learned more clearly than anything that money matters more than people. They’ve shown us this.
In such a short time we learned these things. Swift like a sudden storm playing out its dark destruction and leaving us in its wake confused and unsettled. Unsettled because we remembered a different way but it was drifting now away from us.
It is our job to remember.
It is our job if nothing else to remember that our instincts to betterment was the best of human striving. In the days before the psychopaths.
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