Dear Diary,
For the longest time now, I’ve believed the deep down core of me was anger. I rarely spoke of it because I was ashamed at my inability to cease having recurring feelings of anger despite having a good understanding of it. Anger is an actionable emotion driven from a source of protection. In many cases, things fall into two categories with one similarity: either the problem is too massive for me to solve unilaterally, or the problem lies in the past and is unchangeable. In both cases, when I examine what is within my ability to control, the answer is little, and that feeling of helplessness sometimes compounds the initial anger itself.
I’ve come to realize over time that my anger isn’t a cause but an effect. I’ve come to realize the driver of the anger is grief, and I’ve been grieving a *long* time. I have attempted to counter grief not only with forgiveness, which is reactive, but I’ve put a lot of effort into being proactive and put a lot of work into hope; I’ve been working on a significant project about hope, in an effort not just for me but others who struggle with how badly we’ve fallen.
Growing up, for a brief time, it felt like we were moving in a direction toward awareness, harmony, and togetherness; it seemed we were on a good track. We wanted to: “Save the Whales,” “Free Tibet,” “End Apartheid,” “Tear Down The (Berlin) Wall,” “Make Love Not War,” “All You Need Is Love,” “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child,” and more. We went from that to ‘Fuck You, I Got Mine.’ The thing is, I never lost my connection to everyone nor my awareness of the world outside my skin or my front door.
I remember the cliché of “You’d better eat that there are starving kids in Africa!” Today, there are starving kids here at home, a lot of them. We force kids to attend school but refuse to ensure they have the nutrition required for health, and it’s by design. During a press conference on 29 October 1970, Roger A. Freeman, an advisor to Ronald Reagan, said, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat.” Reagan would then wage war against public school tuition, and one need not look far to see how that turned out – yet another of Reagan’s actions from which we still suffer.
I think of Columbine, which occurred on 20 April 1999. If there was an opportunity for the character of our nation to stand up and say ‘Nope, we’ve gone too far,’ that was it. Instead, our system once again demonstrated it wasn’t broken; it was designed this way, as we showed the world, not even the deaths of children will stand in the way of profit. Since then, at least an entire generation of people has grown up knowing their sacrifice on the altar of the bottom line will fall on deaf ears, and there have been many sacrifices.
A hit song in 1970 was Stevie Wonder’s ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)’, a repentant and hopeful song featuring lyrics such as:
“Here I am, baby, oh, oh
(Signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yours)
You got my future in your hands.”
A song that talks about the future with optimism.
Fast forward to the year 2000, and a theme from a major movie, Mission Impossible 2, has a song from Limp Bizkit with a chorus that goes:
“I know why you wanna hate me (I know why you wanna hate me)
Cause hate is all the world has even seen lately.”
I’ll be the first to say two songs taken in isolation is not by any means exhaustive or conclusive. I also think about hip-hop and how much easier it was to find the social consciousness in it, up to a point. Then it became much easier to find sexualization, materialism, and violence. I’m not saying that neither existed before or after, but rather the prevalence of them.
Of course, I have to at least mention the stolen 2000 election, Citizens United, 9/11, the erosion of rights post 9/11, and an entire cascading series of events making lives worse for the majority of people. We need to acknowledge the obscene wealth gap, lack of access to health care, our backwards march on human rights, and how we apparently need to re-learn WWII all over again, the hard way. Trump just gets a name, for I could be here all day, and we still have years more to go.
Finally, the Iraq War, a place that had nothing to do with 9/11, didn’t have WMDs (and we knew it), and cost us over a trillion dollars and millions of lives lost, displaced, and permanently altered. I was one of those ‘permanently altered’ by the age of 19, let alone everything else piled on top.
I deeply regret my personal actions, which have caused irreparable harm to people who did nothing wrong to us. I mourn seeing greed rewarded so thoroughly, where restricting access instead of expanding it is the world in which we live. I mourn seeing people having to succeed in spite of the system, rather than because of it. It is just constant loss, from people randomly disappearing, more frequent natural disasters, people in power needing more, declining living standards, back-to-back ‘once in a generation’ moments, etc.
It’s just constant loss. In combat, one does not have an opportunity to mourn before the next tragedy strikes; civilian life should not also have the same operational tempo, but here we are.
I become angry because I want to protect so much: my lonely past self suffering rejection after rejection knowing that I’m full of love, wisdom, patience, and more, the people who just want to go to the doctor so they can get back on their feet and work toward their dreams, the people who want to go to school to do the same, the people who work hard at their jobs but still can’t make ends meet but watch as billionaires tell them they don’t deserve housing, healthcare, or education, and more.
I know in 2025, wanting basic human dignity makes me a radical in the eyes of many, and I’ll wear that label. If we have the money to waste making ICE one of the most well-funded forces in the world, we have the money to feed children. It really is that simple. All it takes for Evil to succeed is for Good people to do nothing, and I used to wonder where everyone else is. They’re kept poor, sick, and tired, and thus unable to resist. In the Vietnam Era, students could afford to attend school while working summer jobs and protesting on the side. Those days were murdered by the same types of people who want to send troops into your city, disappear people off the street and ship them off to third party countries they have no relation with whatsoever.
Grief without action (*1) means just as much as faith without action and I will continue to teach, write, speak out, and remind people they are not alone. It’s what I can do right now.
reBLUEvinate!
(*1) – I’d like to expand and clarify. When you’re delivered bad news, I am not demanding one leap into immediate action. There is a time and place for processing. However, if all we do is think, then at some point we’re just talking to ourselves, and it could reach a point where we are so deeply immersed in our minds, talking to ourselves, that we are entirely removed from any semblance of the present. I can admit I’ve been to that point myself, and I’ve gotten better not doing that anymore – it is part of why I do what I do, helping others avoid the same mistake.