20/20: the year of (vision)airy-fairies
By: Km Fikes
Tags: Progressivism, Activism, Year In Review, Democratic Primary

Feel free to read with Tchaikovsky’s Sugar Plum FAIRY Suite playing in the background. Personally dig the oboe here as it comes in like Gladys-Knighted Pip. Safest Season’s Greets…

Air…Ere the Democratic party settled on the numbing mediocrity of Joe Biden, it was a vibrant presentation of progressive possibility. For some? This snow-flaked vibrancy blinded. Others found themselves tickled. ‘Too bright, too soon’ garnered a laughter less patronizing and more so welcoming of comic relief on the campaign trail. Ultimately, ‘dimming’ was chosen — mystically as preemptively numb from COVID and Northwest fires yet to occur, an eerily prescient non-choice formed a nigh psychic Democratic ticket. The year had yet to unravel where blindspots were in the usual order — utterly unrecognizable until too late. Desperate need for comfort and return to semblance of sense, made the risks of evolving policy untenable. In theory. Yet HOW, despite our motley selves, we wound up practicing some riskiest bidness!

The top lunatic contenders were — ostensibly — Senator Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All, businessperson Andrew Yang’s Universal Basic Income and motivational author/speaker Marianne Williamson’s early mention of African-American Reparations. Much of the demos scoffed.

2020 laid bare mad genius by dusting cobwebs off common sense. The need for comprehensive health coverage during a pandemic became too condescending to consider self-explanatory. The lunacy was no longer in a socialist-suspicious policy proposal but in the inane custom of tying medical access to employment. Apparently, we required the lesson of who is ‘essential’ to our economy and none, ironically enuf, sat in the boardrooms — no longer union halls — that chronically decide our fate.

For those who still chuckle at Mr. Yang, one wonders if they were too amused to cash their Stimulus check. And/or hope for another.

The candidate who slid into silly base embraced Reparations as an extension of her ethos. Oh so long ago. She preached atonement and framed Reparations as a nation’s natural ‘reckoning’. Further, her call for sum’in as airy-fairy as consciousness stood in unnerving contrast to a White-House-turned-Black-Hole where nuttin’ escapes the gravitational pull: “alternative facts” — like time — slow whilst any ‘light’ is sucked thru this mysterious cosmic straw where moral fiber does not fray nor snap but simply eviscerates. Ethical cores stretch past recognition into what astrophysicists actually term, ‘spaghettification’. Alas, ’twas Williamson who served as the noodle on a Democratic stage.

The ideas deemed least were needed the most this year of years. 20/20 vision — like the lens click of an ophthalmologist: Clearer here? Or here? One. Or Two? This practice of clarity to refine our ‘gaze’ was thrust upon America’s collective myopia.

Now is not the time.

Now would be too much to ask; all in due course.

White ‘allied’ preachers spoke thus to MLK. Contrary to the most recent commercial film’s exorbitantly generous depiction, Harriet Tubman’s husband was not supportive of her desire to flee — gaslighting her resolve with the limitations of her disability — ‘spells’, as they were. Black Lives Matter activists were nigh terrorists by popular discourse the day before a state knee squeezed out the last breath from George Floyd.

A standard Snellen vision testing chart from the 1950s from American Academy of Ophthalmology

That was Lens One. Click to Lens Two: BLACK LIVES MATTER placards on upper-middle class (erstwhile-Red-Lined-currently-gentrified) lawns was the only — oddly — apropos response. Not Obama’s translation of Cesar Chavez’ “Si, se puede”. Because “can” is not — and never will be — the immediate ‘matter’ of must.

This GenX Northern Californian well recalls the national AIDS crises of the nineties with apathetic policy abandoning our sick and dying. Likely not Marianne Williamson’s memory as she chose not to ignore in lieu of her activism to found Project Angel Food.

That was Lens One. Click to Lens Two: Whom amongst us could have fathomed AIDS survivors (albeit still disproportionately representative of a privileged class within the LGBTQIA+ community) — still positive — standing healthy as whole, traversing long lines wrapped around San Fran’s City Hall for marriage licenses — preceding the nation’s Supreme Court tardiness by years.

Speaking of one’s beloved region, our latest fire disaster began with mythological lightning. Ay, change, gentlesoulfolk, happens in an almost-other-worldly flash. Or lens click — correcting vision. Granted, grassroots labor pounds each nail into the rusted tracks so that Change can choo choo to meet its moment. That moment though? Decades, if not centuries, of preparation — oft in the form of mortal sacrifice — set the groundwork for the otherwise miraculous instant to hit the ground running. The baton (or hammer) can be dropped and recovered but rue the generation who forfeits their own ride.

Substantive change is rarely convenient and those who imagine it can ever be neat n’ tidy in ideal time frames must have missed Tarana Burke’s MeToo Movement not exactly upend but stick a prick in the overinflation of patriarchy’s underbelly. Why the term, ‘jab’ waited for COVID vaccines boggles the mind. Sum’in shifted; a population rose when Adam’s Rib poked the whole cage. Then again, misogyny cannot be inoculated so perhaps ‘jab’ would have only stung realistic sensibilities. One intentionally types “sensibilities” rather than ‘expectations’ because the point here is that expectations are set to be toppled with outcomes even better. Let us beckon results to blindside. And dazzle.

What does the ballet brutal that was 2020 bode for 2021 and any time that might be lent us beyond? My good peops, there be only one lens of recourse: bold as hell and gracious as heaven! Submitting relevance to face rejection on a sugar-coated platform, eliminating themselves from serious consideration to plum cabinet prospects, (vision)airy-fairy candidates took flight - offering survival ‘dust’. Shunned. [Cue the oboe.] Williamson, Yang, and Sanders now stand not in the vicinity of a Presidential podium. Their ideas tho’? Forged a pandemic response plausible. Once diagnosed far-sighted yet proven near, their imagination rippled right into reality before a President-Elect was conferred said status. For the love of all things evolving, Biden is, well…he is what is ‘left’ us. To lead a transformation. At a juncture in a democracy fantastically fragile. Thencefo’, what does conscious citizenship involve/demand/dare? Maybe some magical ‘poof’ of provocation. Relentlessly — as if the nation depends upon thy rabble(rebel)-rousing. Fo’ sho’ seems so. The mind’s eye of (vision)airy-fairies doth not tip-toe; it flits to n’ fro. Should we trap dragonflies’ glow in a jar, allowing the Biden/Harris administration to inch in incremental-Obama-regression? Or might we break the seal with lil’ mo’ than combustive “twinkle, twinkle”, cracking, if not shattering — less symbolic and more structural — glass ceilings? Might we insist upon striding ahead by perhaps ignoring that 2021 is not marked by February’s calendar and can still be a year to leap?

Winter Solstice is upon us — the season honoring restorative hibernation. We spent the better part of 2020 sheltering. Already. Only then, we shivered in fear. Each season’s purpose, howe’er, should be holistically honored: “reap, sow, turn, turn”. Consequently, this winter, gather thy strength. Pause at the enormity of loss that our po’ coddled culture seems ill-equipped to see straight. For ev’ry life past? Blink. Thru most reverent tears for it is only that welling up with the dignity of grief that justifies a blurry eye. Fall asleep weeping. Let dreams be haunted by how much we fail. Awake.

Press on; rise high. Make the mass exit worthy of our remain. In one (vision)airy-fairy New Year.

KM Fikes is an intersectional absurdist playwright & poet & experimental novelist. With this blog. (Perhaps, redundant?)