The Perfect Manifestation
“It” is Our Own Creation
I will not mention “it” by name. Partly because of enormous antipathy but also because I now think that focusing on “it” allows us to avoid a much more uncomfortable question.
What if “it” is the ultimate manifestation of all we have become?
I no longer see “it” as a human being whose behavior, words, or values are vile beyond words. I see something larger: a culmination of much that has been building in the United States for generations.
We often say, We couldn’t have conjured this up. But we actually have.
Take years of systemic racism. Add massive socioeconomic inequality. Add an educational system that has failed miserably to adapt to enormous cultural, economic, and technological change. Add growing isolationism along with a constant glorification of the fantasy that we are untouchable. Sprinkle in climate change/environmental instability. Throw in increasingly unattainable health care, rising mental illness, disillusionment, apathy surrounding a representative government and the failure to value collective responsibility. Then add technology.
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Technology has connected us in extraordinary ways, but it has also given us the ability to construct worlds in which we rarely have to encounter those who challenge us. We can choose our news, our communities, our opinions and increasingly, even our realities. We can be surrounded by people without ever really knowing them. Heck, they may not even be people. We can watch suffering through a screen and then, with one swipe of a finger, make it disappear.
Into this already complicated mixture, add a culture increasingly focused on what we attain rather than who we are. How much do you earn? Where do you live? What do you own? How successful are your children? How many people follow you? How important are you? Somewhere along the way, character became harder to measure than achievement and therefore easier to ignore. Decency doesn’t photograph particularly well. Humility doesn’t generate much attention. Compassion rarely announces itself.
Then add generational trauma. Families pass down more than eye color, recipes and holiday traditions. We inherit fear. Silence. Prejudice. Shame. Anger. Stories about who belongs and who doesn’t. We inherit wounds that were never acknowledged because doing so would require us to examine the people and institutions that came before us — and sometimes ourselves.
And then there is denial. Denial may be one of the most powerful ingredients of all. We deny racism while living with its consequences. We deny inequality while celebrating wealth. We deny loneliness while staring into screens for hours. We deny misogyny while continuing to judge women by standards we rarely apply to men. We deny our collective wounds because confronting them is painful.
Now put all of this into a proverbial blender. And then act surprised by what emerged. Maybe we shouldn’t be.
The concoction we’ve whipped up is not an aberration but a magnification of what we have been unwilling to examine. If we don’t own the monster of our own creation, then we are destined to feed it until it grows so large, “it’s” unstoppable. We won’t have to examine the culture that made “it” possible. We won’t have to ask what we tolerated, what we rewarded, what we ignored or what we quietly helped normalize.
We must stop pretending that the “it” before us came from nowhere.
“It” didn’t.
