Reality Breakdown

Have we slipped into a new timeline or is the age of distraction over?

Last week was quite the month. I’m not even sure how to wrap my head around it. There’s so much to process that it’s easy to become overwhelmed.

Let’s get a few things out of the way:

Black Lives Matter. The First Amendment is legit. All cops are bastards. The coronavirus isn’t going away. 

I can hold all of these ideas in my head at the same time. Some have been there for a while (ACAB); some I’m still getting used to (COVID-19). But I can do it. Humans are adaptable and I am an adaptable human. 

Case in point. Last weekend we went to a funeral for the mother of a family friend who’d succumbed after a long illness. The brief service was held at the gravesite. It was going to be a drive-by affair, but the space was so big there was enough room for the mourners to spread out around the grave. 

It was a lovely June day. Mariachis performed traditional songs form Mexicali. The singers—all women—sang beautifully. Everyone was invited to lay a rose on top of the casket as a final farewell. And then we said goodbye. 

A few months ago, the idea of attending a funeral where everyone wore masks and stood several feet apart would have struck me as strange or surreal or deeply upsetting.  

It wasn’t any of those things. It was an island of peace and calm in a country that has seen little of either since video surfaced of George Floyd’s murder by the coward Derek Chauvin. 

It was hard not hugging our friends, but someday—hopefully soon—we will.  We will manage. We will adapt. We are adapting. 

But are we adapting fast enough to make the changes that need to be made for the health and well being of this country?

I don’t know, because there’s a lot of stuff coming down the pike that’s making me question reality—not my hold on it, but reality itself. 

Later today I’ll be speaking with novelist Paul Tremblay about his new book Survivor Song for a profile in the Los Angeles Times.

If you don’t know his work, Tremblay writes character-driven psychological horror stories. He’s like Steven King in his prime. I realize that’s a hell of a claim to make but have you read Steven King lately? Trust me, you’re better off reading Paul Tremblay. 

Tremblay’s latest novel is eerily prescient. It’s about a virus that acts as a kind of super rabies that turns people into rabid monsters in a matter of hours. Like Trump, only worse. 

Survivor Song is a clever take on the zombie story. I don’t want to say too much because obviously we’re not living in a zombie apocalypse and zombie stories are always apocalypse stories, and whatever we’re going through this is not that. 

But I’m stunned by everything else that Tremblay correctly anticipates: the lack of PPE, how quickly hospitals are overwhelmed, the massive amounts of disinformation that circulates about the virus. 

Remember, this is a book that was submitted for publication last year and was probably written in 2018, which means he most likely came up with the idea long before that. 

In another timeline, basically.  

I’m not saying reading Survivor Song caused me to slip into an alternate reality but consider the following: 

• After a couple of goons from Buffalo Police Department knocked a 75-year-old protestor to the ground, who immediately started bleeding from his ear, the President went on Twitter to accuse the man of being an ANTIFA agitator who was using an electronic device to black out police scanners. (We had a spirited conversation about Antifa in our house the other night. Annie said it has its roots in Italy where groups formed in opposition to fascism. I maintain it was invented at a Dead Kennedys show in 1982.)

• New York bagel boss Tom O’Meara held a press conference where he said journalists weren’t showing police enough respect. This was after a week when journalists, protesters, and citizens on their way home work, captured over 500 videos of police abusing citizens. Someone has cut some of these clips into the speech so your mind doesn’t melt from the massive amounts of cognitive dissonance. (You know it’s been a weird week when Legos cancels cops. People are so pissed at cops and so hungry for reform that the Paramount Network even cancelled Cops the TV show.)

• Last night, BLM protestors from the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in downtown Seattle took over City Hall. This would seem more strange if a whole bunch of armed Bubbas in Michigan hadn’t done same thing last month over, um, haircuts? The protests in Seattle and Portland have gotten super intense and not enough people are paying attention to it IMO. 

• And then there’s this, one of the darkest articles I’ve read in a long time. It’s the story of Ramsey Orta, the man who recorded the murder of his friend Eric Garner in Staten Island back in 2014 and has been persecuted by the police ever since. The article is from 2019 but Orta just got out of jail a few weeks ago. Did you know the man who filmed Eric Garner’s death had been in jail since October 2016? 

You cannot shut the entire country down for the health and well being of everyone and then systematically oppress BIPOC. 

You cannot enforce laws for the good of public health and then let public safety officers go wild in the streets. 

You can’t take work away from 40 million people, tell us to us stay home, and then broadcast bloodbath after bloodbath while we sit at home horrified. 

These outrages aren’t new, and shame on us for not doing something about them sooner, but we’re not going to put up with it anymore. 

Not in this timeline. 

And you know something? I like this timeline. I like that it’s only taken three months to stop caring about all the bullshit that distracted us from the systems that lift some people up while holding others down. 

Three months and we’re ready to radically restructure our broken systems. Police today. Prisons tomorrow. Then our classrooms. Hospitals after that. We’ve got a lot of work to do because no system prefers less control to more control.

The widespread support of BLM has shined a light on that fact that a growing number of people are willing to reflect on the ways they are complicit with structures that sustain white supremacy. 

But this support has provoked one group in ugly, violent ways and that group is the police. The police are allergic to accountability. The police treat accountability as oppression. 

And we pay for it. With our taxes and also with the harm they cause to our communities.

Not anymore. 

If I was a cop, I’d be looking to jump into another timeline because the people have had enough.