July

I could not write in July, hypnotized as I was by the fire and water inundating the world. Perhaps hypnotized is not the word I am looking for. Paralyzed, maybe? Struck dumb by the folly and corruption of it all. What good are my lamentations? What strength in my small voice? I could not write in July because my soul knew only eulogies for murdered Indigenous leaders in the Amazon and those being arrested in Vancouver, and the Old Growth forests and the watersheds and the lives and cultures they are defending. What does one write as yet again warnings about the Gulf Stream go unheeded—as our leaders sign away the air and the water, label activism terrorism, persecute journalists and torch the world for the sake of profit?

I could not write in July because I was grappling with my belief in the future—or lack thereof—because I have tired at playing Cassandra, like many of my generation. We are ignored. Our concerns—all of our concerns—labeled privileged tantrums by those who have come before and who still clutch white knuckled the wheels of power in their psychotic grasp.

I could not write in July because I could not reconcile gleefuly unfettered ecocide with the joy and hope of young mouths all across the world forming their first words, the futures dreamt by the parents who are lost in awe to such a fierce and tender miracle—one's first word. What can I say in a such a time? It is a level of shared cognitive dissonance unseen before, and soul-chilling to behold. The world burns as it drowns, as people drown fleeing this metasticizing crisis—just as they born in homes and hospitals and refugee camps—just as they say their first or their last words in homes or hospitals or detention centers. I could not write in July because I could not find the answer to my question: what can I, what shall I, what must I do in the face of this devastation?