Happy New Year and welcome to 2020. Last year was not what we would call the best of all possible worlds, was it? So we’re thinking it’s time to rally our forces and change the story, because it’s the story that’s the foundation of everything. I keep thinking, myself, about a couple I knew when they were falling in love, at university with me, both of them close friends at the time, especially the husband. Lovely man. Hilariously funny, self-deprecating, a blast to be around. I still remember us decorating the dorm elevator as a doctor’s waiting room, and settling down on the floor to play cards as the elevator went up and down the tower block. Kids’ stuff. Fun.
Of course it happened, the way it always does, that friends you make at university drift away, and you kind of vaguely wonder what happened to them. In this case, I found out, because they are a key part of the family that promoted the opioid crisis. To my shock, there they were, both of them, named over and over in the complaints. And for the life of me, I could not put the two young people I had known together with the oligarchs who cared for nothing but their own considerably-higher-than-that-of-the-rest of us bottom line. I mean, I just couldn’t. I could hardly believe it was they. But so it was. There was a picture of their daughter. She looked just like her mother when we were both young.
It tugged at my heart. Brought tears to my eyes.
That started me thinking hard. How could that have happened, for God’s sake? What could have changed them? How could they have continually agreed to decisions that were going to harm and kill so many in so many communities?
What I came up with was this: that was the only story they knew. That you were separate from your fellows, and so was your family, and it’s a fight of All against All, so the safer and richer you can make yourself and your family, the better. The more you can grab for yourself, the better. The more you can fend off those who want what you have, the more you can say to yourself, “It’s all good.”
That was the only story they had. You know, that one of capitalism. All except yourself and your family are raw material to be utilized for your own ‘good’. When you follow that shortsighted line out as far as it goes, it ends exactly where my two college pals ended up. It’s not a nice picture. But it’s an accurate snapshot of where we are today. All of us.
Who among us would have done differently? I mean, without some serious study and soul-searching. Who among us don’t just cling to the same story we’d been told, over and over, since we were born? Who among us feel unsafe and insecure until we have as much as we can possibly grab from the world around us?
We have to change the story, folks. We have to make it clear that we’re all in this together. More: we have to make it clear that everything is alive, that’s right, I’m not fooling around here, EVERYTHING. Rocks. Mountains. Sand. Everything. And we are just a part of that great, seething, heaving, joyful, tragic mass. Change the story to that. And then every human being is in the ark with us. After that we don’t need all the crap we think we do to survive.
There are a lot of contributions to that change of ideas here this issue. No surprise, we find a lot of poetry going on: David Selzer’s 2019. Tamra Lucid’s Death of a Hummingbird. Bruce E.R. Thompson’s Mrs. Johnson. Marissa Bell Toffoli’s The Carousel.
And stories urgent about the need to change the story. Nick Engelfried’s hopeful The Hills of Eternity. Darren Payne’s shivery Black Hole. Charles Fischman’s angry indictment of us Baby Boomers, Americans: Grow Up.
If you want to get a template for the kinds of ways we can creatively change the story, have a look at history: Brian Griffith’s Iran’s First Feminist Wave in the 1890s.
Then, if you want a sly laugh to get you up from being down, honestly, have a look at A Small Man is Easy to Keep, by Lanny DeVuono. It’ll keep you off Tinder for life.
I’ll close with a line from an EAP favorite, Chris Farago’s poem, A Benediction For the Coming Year: “If tears come, let us also rejoice/ For it means good times will follow the bad.”
What good times depends on how good a story we tell together. So let’s get cracking.
Welcome, 2020. And welcome, everyone, to the new world we’re building together. Don’t worry about starting small.
Just start.