In the beginning before the beginning, there were drums, and hymns,
Kids marched. Another black trans woman was run off Twitter. Another tech CEO stood up for government agencies charged with detaining and deporting children.
I spent a hundred hours shipping a thing that I’ve spent many hundreds of hours more working on, and then some other things too. People liked the thing, some of them might even pay for the thing. Perhaps you also like the thing?
How do we decide how to spend the time we have left? How do we decide to spend the resources we have left?
I want to feel like the thing I’ve spent so many weeks and months on was worth the effort. I want to feel like the choices I made were the right ones. And perhaps they were. I know that some of the decisions I made made the thing better (and made the thing less likely to enable harm). That matters.
But the kids are marching because the world is on fire and am I doing anything to help them? Because this fire we did start. And we have watched it burn. And watched. And watched. And went on with our lives.
Attribution:
“In the beginning before the beginning, there were drums, and hymns, and a people carried here from another here, and a language stripped and a new one learned, with the songs to go with it. When slaves were carried to America, stolen from places like West Africa and the greater Congo River, with them came a musical tradition. The tradition, generally rooted in one-line melodies and call-and-response, existed to allow the rhythms within the music to reflect African speech patterns—in part so that everyone who had a voice could join in on the music making, which made music a community act instead of an exclusive one.” - from Go Ahead in the Rain by Hanif Abdurraqib