In fact, nothing is about that. As much as we like to think how interconnected we are, how interdependent, the fact of the matter is the teeming mass is remarkably stable. Sure, the whole mass weebles and wobbles around as though at any moment it'll all fall over, but ultimately all it does is jiggle all over like a planetary jello mold. If you were so lucky as to win the ovarian lottery and be born in America, a disaster will not occur to day that will ruin your life tomorrow - guaranteed. So what are we doing here?
We're watching TV. We're going to jobs we hate. We're driving our cars that cost too much money while pining for cars that cost more money, down too-small freeways provided by a too-big government. We're tweeting and Facebooking and texting and emailing about that thing that guy at that place did with that girl from that other place and OMG did you see that?!
But just as no disaster will occur that will ruin your life, chances are, no miracle will save you, either. While most of us are looking at the TV, somewhere in America, someone is looking at a bill they can't pay, a child they can't feed, or a fist-full of pills that keep them alive. Somewhere some fast food worker is being yelled at over french fries as though they were the cure for cancer, AIDS and the common cold - and nowhere, absolutely positively nowhere, is the conversation happened that this isn't civilized society anymore, it's panem et circenses.
A little history. Once upon a time in this far away place called Rome, there was an empire that had sprouted out of a Republic. This empire had come to dominate absitively posolutely everything - and I mean everything. If there was a speck of dirt to be seen, the Romans had seen it, claimed it, slapped a Latin name on it, and built a road to it. Rome had more or less had its way with the world for hundreds of years, and then it started to decline. During the decline, a satirist (yes, satire is this old), first coined this phrase to refer to superficial appeasement. The people got their bread, they went to the circus, they watched the lions eat the Christians, everyone (except the Christians) had a great time, and nobody paid any attention to the impending doom - I mean, did you see when that gladiator at that colosseum took that big honkin' sword and ran it through that other guy? Wasn't that the coolest thing ever?! No, I don't care about whatever the Meccabees or Maccabees or Honey bees in the cedar trees of Judea - when is the next circus?
Sound familiar?
There's still the major issue that separates us from Rome. They thought they had subjugated the world. We've actually done it. If you are not starving now, you are not likely to be starving tomorrow. If you do not have AIDS now, you will not need three hundred dollars with of pills tomorrow (and every day thereafter). If you are not homeless now, you are unlikely to wake up in a cardboard box. Those positions are already filled. This is about that.
We could fix it. We could turn off the TV, we could ignore the Kardashians and the Jersey Shore and the litany of red carpets, and fix it. We could get up off our ever-widening American asses and close the ever-widening American gap between have and have-not, the cultural and economic divide that is increasingly making it impossible to relate to anyone not in your own little strata off the Republic. I refuse to believe there is any such thing as a stone-hearted American. They don't exist, and frankly, I think it's actually part of the problem. We don't want to watch the mother fighting with the DES guy that no, really, the money is gone and she needs assistance now. Seeing a man wasted to nothing from HIV turns our stomach. Stories of unbalanced people hording kittens make our skin crawl. So we turn away. We get our bread, we go to our circus, we see who gets impaled or eaten by lions today, we go home - but we know. It nags at the back of the mind, eats at the corner of the heart. We don't look at the unfortunate, not directly, they live at the periphery of our vision - but we know. Sometimes the thought penetrates our waking mind that we really can't deal with living in this world where a very few of us are doing extraordinary, and the rest are split between the haves and the about-to-be-killed-offs.
We could fix it. We could roll up our sleeves and get involved. Our government will not fix this. Our churches will not fix this. The problem is a lack of faith, hope, and love. Faith in our ability to fix it, hope in our ability to succeed, and a love of life that will not stand by and let destruction happen. But those three things last forever - we do not. We have the equivalent of a cosmic sneeze here. Whatever faith, hope and love can be crammed into the soul of one man is nothing more than one small speck of stuff. No matter how many soups you serve, or clothes you donate, or kitties you save, you will never, ever, be more than one speck. But it is one speck that was not there before. It is one speck brighter, one speck further from the abyss. Individually they may be nothing, but in the unorchestrated chaotic undirected aggregate, they go where the fit, they fit where they go, and that steady accretion of specks will stop the slide, will give us a foothold, and spare us the fate of Sisyphus - or worse.
I'm starting to volunteer. Through political avenues where I can find a voice, through LGBT organizations where I can help my own community, and come Fall semester I intend to get involved with the ASPCA. It does not make me love my job. It does not make the bills easier to pay. It is time consuming, and at times, it is discouraging. There are reminders at every turn of my status as "speck" - but I am a strangely unburdened speck. I believe less and less in the decline we all know and feel and are told is real, because I see proof every day that the there's an alternative. My email is flooded with people working to create an alternative. I am watching all these specks come together in an army of the insignificant create a teeny tiny bulwark between us and the great oubliette of history. I know all these specks will be here but a little while. Elections end, strays get adopted, and someday there will be a cure for AIDS. We will all eventually stop our toiling both for the day and for the longer night. But our works wrought of faith, hope, and love - those things endure.
