Fragility

Fragility.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the fragility of things these past two weeks as I keep my goals of writing 1,000 words-of-fiction-a-day and reading one-book-per-week.

Specifically, the kind of things we cherish and hold dear. The kind of things that gives us a sense of the warm fuzzies when we hold our loved ones at night.

What are these “things”?

I’m talking about great epic abstractions like freedom, equality, love, family and good habits.

The kind of things that are hard-fought for, require a lot of work and effort and constant attention and individualized energy… and can vanish or break at any minute, suddenly.

We like to think of these things as solid and foundational and reliable. But they’re not. Not if the people benefiting from it don’t put in the perpetual and perrenial care like a gardener would.

There’s a great MLK quote I’d like to share here:

“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."

See, the problem with all those wonderful things I just listed out is, they all require continuous sacrifice, suffering and struggle.

But nobody, or very few people these days, want to do that shit. It’s so much easier to read fake news on Facebook, upvote funny, clever memes on Reddit, retweet some inspiring quote on Twitter.

And the reason I’m thinking about the fragility of these noble goals is…

Well, the first two books of my one-book-per-week goal both dealt with how fragile these noble abstractions are. How quickly they get broken and lost. How easily human society as a whole succumbs to evil apathetically.

The first book I read in 2017 was Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing

It follows two musical families through multiple generations from the Chinese Civil War… to the Communist Revolution… through all of Mao’s crazy ideas (Hundred Flowers Campaign… Great Leap Forward… Cultural Revolution)… pass Deng, Tiananmen Square and up to 2016 in Vancouver. (That’s right, my hometown). It’s a grand sweep of history.

And as you read it, you can’t help but feel the weight of political movements greater than individuals crushing them, grinding them down and destroying them inch by inch.

Family forced to turn on each other. Denouncing. Spying. Betrayal.

Everything we thought that was good and whole in the world — family, art, loyalty — crushed, like the fragile insects they are.

The second book I read in 2017 was Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

(I was originally going to read The Girl on the Train, but I saw the teaser trailer for “The Handmaid’s Tale” as adapted for Hulu and Atwood took priority.)

Don’t go clicking away and hunting for it. What with your short attention span. I know you. That’s why I posted it down here instead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dre0wQmLGe8

TANGENT: Now it’s my turn to get distracted. I was googling that trailer for you when I discovered the 1990 version starring Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall written by Margaret Atwood herself and… Harold Pinter? The playwright?

Trailer below. Don’t watch it unless you’ve read the book already. This is the sort of trailer they used to make that gives the entire plot away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWQ4xnyLy1U

ANYWAY — Where was I?

The FRAGILITY of things. Right.

In “The Handmaid’s Tale”, martial law is declared after the president is assassinated and congress is bombed. Sterility rates are dismal. And all of a sudden, with the turn of a heel, we are in a monotheistic state where fertile woman are herded like cattle to be surrogate mothers.

It is horrifying.

And yet, you wonder, how many steps are we away from dystopian societies like this and 1984 and Brave New World and We…. how far are we from this happening in reality?

Olivia read “The Handmaid’s Tale” years ago, and in one of our many chats during the week, she said, “I was bothered by the fact our rights would go just like that without a fight without an uprising. I was bothered by the entire premise.” (Emphasis mine.)

I mean, you seriously have to ask yourself in today’s political climate. How far away are we?

Now, if you surf the Internetz like I do, you might have see a few similar memes going around.

One is this cute chalkboard outside a bookstore:

https://i.redd.it/oyzn4tgs6r4y.jpg

Another similar meme shows a hand putting a copy of 1984 into the non-fiction section.

And as you look around what’s happening right now in the world… you see mass surveillance, media manipulation and perpetual warfare. Demagogues coming to power everywhere. People voting for things they don’t really understand or were blatantly lied to about.

This stuff is frightening, because the “noble ideals” of humanity — freedom, equality and the pursuit of happiness — all that stuff is being taken away one bit at a time by this backsliding.

We’re like frogs in slowly boiling water.

We’re supposed to put up a fight, get out on the streets and protest, write to our congressman or whatever.

But we’re not.

Now — I don’t want to turn this into a long-winded political discussion on a writing blog here.

Not because I think “we shouldn’t talk politics”. That’s a stupid argument. Politics permeate everything… especially writing.

And as fellow Garage Fiction Writer Alex would say, “we have a narrative responsibility.”

But I need to move on because I’ve been working on this journal entry much longer than I anticipated and I still owe myself another 1,000 words of fiction today.

(On that note, please feel free to continue the conversation in the comments below if you’ve read either books I read. Always happy to talk dystopians and authoritarian governments, in fiction or reality).

Anyway, let’s move on…

Let’s talk about the fragility of good habits.

(How’s that for a segue to my writing 1k/day?)

Just like my rambling on defending good against evil above… good habits are hard.

We want the benefits of them without doing the work. A fit, healthy body. A brimming investment portfolio. A deep connection with our loved ones. An infinite hope for our future prospects. A lasting legacy for future generations.

And what’s more, habits are… fragile.

We break them. We hack the rules and cheat. We stop and give up. We find excuses. We shift blame and justify.

And it’s with that frame in mind that I’m happy to say that I have kept my word so far fourteen days in.

It helps that I have a wonderful accountability partner named Olivia who’s doing the same goal with me in 2017.

It helps we report in to a third party (Bryan) even though we never officially appointed him the bookkeeper.

It helps that I got kicked out of a Facebook group with this exact same 1k/d goal and now I defiantly want to accomplish this goal more. (Me getting banned from this group is another story for another time…)

My stats, if you care:

WEEK ONE: January 1 - 7

WEEK TWO: January 8-14

So, so far, so good.