My friend posted a photo, text over a colorful graphic. It read: “Evil is boring. Cynicism is idiotic.
Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Joy is fascinating.
Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is your birthright. Receptivity is a superpower.
” It was the morning, I was feeling bright, I was feeling like I wasn’t going to feel okay unless I kicked my ass to get moving to feel okay. I shared the post to my page. It felt motivating to me in the moment.
An acquaintance responded in a private message: “Omg yes! All we have to do is feel good! We never have to take ownership of the way our comfort is at the cost of others! All we have to do is be hedonistic and never do anything actually useful for anyone other than ourselves.” They’d thrown a few heart-eyed smiley faces in there too. Now, classically, what the hell, where do I begin.
I’d like to write some kind of intelligent dissection of what place joy has in our lives while the active grief of genocide presses forward, and not just reel off a pithy complaint about being confronted so sharply, and so, so ineffectively. But in my ways. I get it.
This is the format of discourse I’m seeing modeled a lot, we’re seeing it modeled all around us. I’m thinking not about morals but about how we speak to each other about them. How we hold them collectively in community.
And through this most recent crisis, I’ve seen this so often, and usually in the parasocial quicksand of social media: condemnation. Blame. .
