i think this year only taught me to love the smallest things. okay. okay. so the world is trying to kill us. so the world has succeeded in a few cases.
but in the shower this morning i realized that little girls are going to dress up as ghostbusters this year for halloween. that we have a movie where women save the day and don’t need to look pretty.
okay. so a human pile of excrement is our republican candidate. but target, lifeblood of my middle-aged mom side - target took a stand for trans rights even though they didn’t have to. ben and jerry’s came out in full and explicit support of black lives matter. small things, i think to myself. how many people stood in the florida heat to give blood in the wake of the orlando shooting. how many people donated time and money to the victims, how the hospitals refused to charge the victims.
it’s the small things. hamilton sweeps the tony’s with a cast of diverse actors and actresses. pokemon go gives people the chance to make friends and embrace nature. disney responds to public demand, makes mulan right and promises to cast all chinese actors.
sometimes it’s us. us, our small bodies, just little atoms of resistance, sick of the way things are going, promising ourselves to the void. my school at umass amherst responds to the idea of a clown killer by dressing up in hockey equipment and threatening to hurt anyone who would hurt us; i watch frat boys form teams to get girls home safe just in case. i watch our generation flood the streets after police killings, i watch our footprints refuse to backtrack. i watch peace rallies, christians forming protective rings around muslims praying, young girls demanding better from double standards, protests that swell the streets.
i think: okay. the storm is trying to swallow us. but we are somehow staying. more than lighthouse, we are the waves, picking up in the face of the wind, laughing, asking the world to keep throwing things at us because we only grow, we only survive, and we still make good out of terrible; carve it out of our own bodies if we have to; but we do it.
we make good. we make good. and it’s pretty incredible.
