[Warning: Contains profanity and potentially triggering opinions. The ideas expressed in this piece are not necessarily shared by other authors on this site, or by The Green Phoenix as a whole.]
Delivered as a spoken word poem at Berry College, on February 29, 2020, at an eco-poetry reading.
I don’t know about you, but I am
Tired.
I don’t know if it’s the millennial of me hearing too much news, too much tragedy all the time, no escape, it’s all Interwoven, messed up, compassion fatigue, climate grief, etcetera...
Don’t get me wrong, I have been sad.
Scrolling through Instagram at all of those artistic depictions of the planet looking like a weeping mother, at all the forests on fire and the endangered species lists teetering toward extinction unless they were cute. Some days, I would just cry under the covers wishing I was revolutionary enough to do something myself, instead of appreciating the fact that I was just a kid and... should’ve been allowed to think like one.
I have been fatalistic.
In middle school, when everything was depressing enough and I was one of those kids, you know? I used to head off to the buses and call back to my friends, “Seeya tomorrow, maybe.”
“Maybe?” they’d ask.
“Yeah, I might die later, who knows what’ll happen? Might get hit by a meteor,” turning on my heel with some clever smirk like I was so smart for being aware of my own mortality at what? 13?
And then later I found out about the Mayan calendar ending on 2012 or something, and everyone was freaking out thinking the world was gonna end, and I said,
“Hey,
If we all die, at least we go to the same place at the same time, right? No one misses anyone else.”
No one has to watch the world burn if the apocalypse kills us all first...
I have been angry, angry, angry.
Eco-terrorist angry, kill the sitting president and all his capitalist cronies angry, chain myself to a tree and scream forever angry. Give me a weapon and any sliver of opportunity, I will keep swinging Angry.
I’ve even been optimistic--thought I could be the hero of the whole damn world.
I remember sitting on my patio on the 4th of July in the back of the house with my dog, playing with legos, because I hated the fireworks.
No
I hated the smoke. Because before I finished elementary school, I knew the polar bears were dying
and I told my mother as much, tried to wash the dishes with as little water as possible, forced my step-dad to buy the green light bulbs from Home Depot and promised myself I’d get an electric car when I was older and…
here I am.
At an eco-poetry reading hosted on one of the prettiest campuses in the US, with gorgeous hiking trails and herds of deer on its perfect lawns full of pesticides and its fake recycling program and borderline dangerous sinkholes the administration won’t talk about…
Hoping for a bit of that old spark from fellow poets. Something to get me moving and rebellious again.
But I’m scared it’s just another two hours, you know? Like that feeling you get when you leave the theater after having just watched some YA fantasy novel movie about war and fighting against your oppressors or something, fired up and fully prepared to cut a motherfucker or write a manifesto about human rights. But best case scenario, you go home and sign up for a protest somewhere, or by the time you get to bed, you’ve already forgotten.
Because you’re in college. You don’t have time for this crap. That’s fair.
But we have the luxury of being sad, and then angry, and then fine. And then back to work, forgetting the meaning of crisis until the next time a pessimistic, realistic study comes out.
Hey the world is ending.
Hey the earth is on fire.
Just thought I’d remind you...
Just last year, Bill Nye said to get your shit together: “I didn’t mind explaining photosynthesis to you when you were twelve, but you’re adults now, and this is an actual crisis! Safety glasses off, motherfuckers.”
Greta Thunberg, who is still actually a child said she would get awards for what she’s doing, be praised with the cover of Times magazine, but that nothing would change. I don’t think that’s true. I mean, I feel like it is, but I know somewhere, somehow, her words have effected change and bad news media is more compelling, but there is good news if you search for it, even if our evolution monkey brains find all the negative memories to latch onto--it’s a survival tactic: We have to train our brains to remember the good things! Being hopeless isn’t going to change anything, we have to fight we have to work towards something better we are the only species with enough awareness and power to fix things we have to try and keep trying until the people who say stop finally shut the hell up or die or something! I get it!
I get it.
But I am tired. I am so. Tired. They told us all our lives we’re the generation that’s going to save the world,
it’s up to us,
we are the future.
But I didn’t ask for this.
I certainly didn’t ask to live in interesting times… Then again, I can’t think of many portions of human history that were… peacefully uninteresting.
But shit, I’m not responsible for the great big stinking mess we’ve created for ourselves since the fucking industrial revolution!
And yet I still want to clean it up, like somewhere in my brain I’m still that little girl picking up litter and throwing it away thinking some poor squirrel would eat it if I didn’t.
I mean I wrote this poem, didn’t I? More of a rant, rambling on to who knows where, but I got the words down onto a page and showed up and stood here and read it to you. Maybe if I can do that, I can do more.
Maybe if I can do that, you can too.
Who knows? Maybe that will be enough. Maybe it won’t.
Either way, we’re going to be the ones still around to find out. Exhausted and waiting for the end or… still screaming.
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