The Main Event, by stacy-marie ishmael

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August 10, 2025

so loud we / stopped hearing it.

In Cleveland, at a journalism conference. Some of us looking to turn information into meaning, some of us seeking to turn meaning into community.

Conversations and reflections on the state of the world, deploying “well you know it could be worse” and “I’m doing alright, all things considered” so as not to seem ungrateful for our relative privileges.

Because while some of those assembled worked at places being sued by the US government and others at places that had recently settled lawsuits with the US, none of us were dying in a tent, being killed as part of a targeted attack by a government claiming without evidence that we were affiliated with Hamas.

None of us were having to document our own starvation.

Because in any gathering of people who do not get to rely on the endless indulgence of the status quo, there is always a knowing undercurrent that safety is both contingent and temporary. A shared understanding that the relevant question for us is not if, but when.

And that the answer, once again and for many, is now.

Attribution

By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already
ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending
world spun in its place. It ended, and we woke up and ordered Greek coffees,
drew the hot liquid through our teeth, as everywhere, the apocalypse rumbled,
the apocalypse remembered, our dear, beloved apocalypse—it drifted
slowly from the trees all around us, so loud we stopped hearing it.
— from The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi 
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