You can’t read it, but that’s what the piece of paper says in the third and fourth slides.
I took these Polaroids earlier today because I’ve been searching for a means to articulate a melancholy that’s become neck deep; a feeling of fundamental disjunction between how I spend my days and my weeks and what this particular time in history is actively asking of you and me.
There’s a break between my life’s work and our common purpose that’s become increasingly impossible to ignore.
How are we to look back on our actions today?
How am I to form these memories?
Shame. Shame.
Unspeakable shame.
The institution I’ve given my life to over the past five years has never seemed more irrelevant. What will they write about us decades from now? What were we doing when the last mirage of a rule-based order was lost in the flames of a scorched earth?
How did we bear witness?
How did we speak truth to power?
We did not. We do not.
And I am not innocent of this stain. I am tired. I am impotent. I have no words. I cannot vote with my feet. No thoughts, no prayers. No justice. No peace.
Hope? I have it. I see the seeds in the bramble that not even bombs can destroy. But I cannot partake in it. I have forfeited my right to abide in hope. I am cast aside and burned.
The seeds of hope are sprouting but the fruit they bear is not for us to savor. That time will come. Our time is now. We live today. And today is bitter.
Let’s keep talking about A.I. Let’s strike another pose. Let’s check our balance at the end of the month. Let’s eat well and get our steps in. Whatever happens, just know: a rag will be hoisted, be it white, or black, or red, or blue.
All is fair in love and war—that’s how the ditty goes.