Watch them seethe when stimulated
Somewhere, in the Discourse about Ye and Elon, is a forgetting.
Subject / object collision and conflict, media mediated.
We (that media we) show ourselves ill-equipped to learn and lacking in both sensitivity and sensibility when confronted with everything from how auditory processing works to turning vulnerable people’s lives into political theatre.
We (that media we) love an appeal to precedent, rarely reflect on who set those norms and who benefited from the enforcement thereof.
Every day demands that we (not only that media we) ask better questions and instead we (ibid.) look for solace in answers written to describe a different time, another place.
Sometimes you hear “there was no golden era” but that’s not true; there always was, for some. There never has been, for all. What makes us more uncomfortable?
I think often of something Dr. Pat Bishop used to say, “until all have crossed, none have crossed, and some we have to carry.”
Dr. Bishop was a brilliant and fundamentally generous person who saw possibility and potential and beauty everywhere.
Some people, some we have to drag.
Attribution
Boil over—it’s what the nerves do,
Watch them seethe when stimulated,Murmurs the man at the stove
To the one at the fridge—Watch that electric impulse that finally makes them
Fume and fizz at eitherFrayed end.
— from Boil by Alicia Ostriker