The Land of Constant Mourning
We don’t even get the day off work to grieve.
In America, violence is the click track. In 1619, it counted us in. In 2022, it still does. I know it’s hard to hear with everything blaring so loudly.
There has almost never — not in my lifetime, and I assume not in yours — been a time when we weren’t at war. If not with the world, then with ourselves. In this country, we kill. The many who don’t decry the violence appear to cheer for it openly.
I don’t even need to tell you what I’m referencing, or go into detail carrying statistic after weighty statistic. Yet between the pandemic, climate change, state-sanctioned murder, domestic terrorism, declining life expectancy, forced birth, the opioid crisis, sky-high maternal death rates, and “garden-variety” gun violence, it’s hard not to shake the feeling that in America, death is our lingua franca. It’s our indoctrination. It’s how we tell our children to “grow up.” By traumatizing them … assuming they survive past recess.
Welcome to the land of constant mourning. We don’t even get the day off work to grieve. I woke up at 6 a.m., started editing at 7:30, and by 11:00 I was neck-deep in Slack messages. “How are you?” “Good! You?”
No … I am not good. We are not good. But alas, it’s just back to work. Nothing changes and…
