The Wait

I wait. They tell me to wait. They tell me things will get better soon - next week, next month, next bombshell, next election.

As I wait, I watch the hate rise and the truth die. I watch a flag fade into a negative parody of its own image, the man occupying the office formerly lauded as the leader of the free world held up as a paragon and inspiration to the worst elements of humanity. I watch as, under cover of numbing outrage, our justice system is stacked and perverted to ensure that the future will never rise above the prejudices and superstitions of the past.

As I wait, I watch hope fade for the futures I read about, futures where our species learns from its worst mistakes and survives to make more, where we don't boil our only home alive. I watch as greed empowers ignorance, as disaster is shrugged off as imaginary, then exaggerated, then inevitable. I watch as the same species that cracked the genome code and has sent technology to the furthest reaches of our solar system fails to comprehend that we cannot survive without pollinators for food or without water to drink, treating both as acceptable losses in the name of nebulous Progress.

As I wait, I watch the few sow chaos among the many. I watch the ignorant steamroll the educated. I watch the backward cripple the forward. I watch faiths weaponized as fanaticism. I watch patriotism corrupted into nationalism all around the world. I watch elected leaders spit directly in the eyes of the majority by failing to uphold both the letter and the spirit of the offices to which they were elevated, even as they actively cripple the means by which they could be held accountable.

Every day, I see the damage mount, the toll rise, the path forward grow exponentially longer, steeper, dimmer. I see the numbing, the normalization. I see no refuge, no holdout, no way to get there even if there were one.

I do what little I can, resist in the minor ways within my meager means. I try to tell myself it will matter.

Mostly, I wait. They tell me to wait.