The November project 2019, part 14

Haze. The nights are eternally long right now, and yet it’s been so long since I saw even a ingle star. The days are overcast, as are the nights. It has affected me both mentally and physically; my skin feels as gray as the sky, my brain as obscure as the sky.    It’s not just the weather that makes me feel like garbage. Every day I get notifications about the misery in the world, about oppression, coups, environment catastrophes, famine, wildfires, cuttings in the most important organs of society. It easily makes me feel powerless, hopeless, as if the powerholders of the world are driving a bus with the entire population inside, but they’re heading right towards the abyss. What is there even for a small person like me to do? There was supposed to be a text today where the narrator had been convinced by their classmate Marta to join her on a left-wing meeting, where they’d paint signs and banners for an upcoming rally. What it’d be about, the rally that is, I hadn’t decided on yet, but anything could work. Something about how violence against women must come to an end, something about how we need to stop climate change, something about stopping the deportations to Afghanistan. Marta and the narrator would bond, discuss why the world is so fucked up, even broken, and how to mend it. How do you wake the solidarity in people? Is there good in each and every living thing? What is it really that drives people to be so hungry for power and control? Why do so many people excuse racism, homophobia, misogyny, and how are there middle-class people who either actually believe in capitalism and find it to be a good and sustainable system – or that it’s bad and the root to many problems, but those problems can be fixed by just choosing the right products and companies? And what was actually going on in the heads of the powerful men in Soviet and East Germany – how could one think that controlling the people was good as long as the economy was planned instead of market based? There must be another way to do communism.    Those were the kind of things they would discuss. They’d sit in some basement hall with slightly bad air that smells like dust, there’d be worn-out couches and old posters encouraging you to support Palestine, Vietnam, Cuba. There’d be girls with super short bangs and guys in over-sized flannel shirts. Marta and the narrator would discover something in each other, an interest would awake apart form the activism. But I don’t know how I would describe it. It was late last night when I wrote the Swedish version of this, and right now I’m on a train with very limited time before arrival in Gothenburg. I don’t have time to come up with all the good wordings, transitions, whatever makes an idea an actual text. I got home late last night, and as soon as I arrive, I’ll be busy all evening. So there’ll be no “real” text today. But still, a text. I hope it won’t be too disappointing. tape