Read on Twitter
You're not losing your mind, you're just watching history happen in real time.
What we mean is, there were always a million awful things happening, you just didn't have to look at them all at once.
Imagine a universe where light moved instantaneously: the blazing fury of a quadrillion suns entering your eyes at the same exact moment. It's always been there, but the vastness of space insulates us from it.
Right now we're all being asked to process a multitude of events that even the most connected world leader of ages past couldn't have understood simultaneously. Our lives are a permanent global crisis.
So maybe we are losing our minds. Humans can't handle 7.5 billion other souls tugging at our conscience every moment. Nothing prepared us for the necessity of so much empathy.
Each of us carries the full knowledge of human suffering, a task once reserved for only the very few capable of bearing that burden. What strange days.
We suppose, by these terms, it's not that surprising that the response of so many to a world that asks each of us to care so much is to aggressively *not care*. To raise figurative and literal walls around a narrow island of things they can extend empathy to.
Be it a nation, a religion, a race, a sexuality, whatever. To say, it's impossible to allow my definition of humanity - those who are real, who have minds of their own, as capable of hope and despair as I am - to emcompass so *many* others.
Because acknowledging that, even allowing for it as a possibility, is to admit that there is suffering on a scale that is mind-shatteringly vast. So vast as to remove all capability of useful action. A paralysis of empathy.
Why not just recoil from that? Why not embrace hatred and division, when the alternative is a kind of madness? Maybe treating huge swathes of the population as empty puppets is a valid survival strategy.
We understand it, but we don't agree with it. Better to rise to potential than fall to iniquity, even if it costs us everything.
Yeah, we had precisely this in mind. https://twitter.com/DeathOfGeese/status/1300007863125934080?s=19
A million is a statistic etc. But what if you could hear the voices of that million as they died? Welcome to Twitter.
Odd to think we already fictionalised much of this thread earlier this month: https://www.patreon.com/posts/40137342
