That Last Small Shard

by Christopher Cunningham

The dusk approaches here in the deep south and the final glittering rays of a long day cut thru the gold and red autumn leaves left hanging on the skeletal limbs. The light scatters across the cool ground, over the collapsing garden, the overgrown grasses, the dust and dirt where the dogs rumble. We've passed thru the ugly swelter of summer and made it thru what seems like years of stale and stagnant heat and now find ourselves at the brink of something large and strange, something without real shape, without definition. We look over the edge and cannot fathom what lies beyond the edge of this weird precipice, what our future might hold. It might be a place of hope, but who can really say? Having come thru the last eight years with the shreds of our humanity and the remnants of our spirit hanging in rough tatters from our bones, we are not prepared to hazard a guess. The apparatus of the police state remains in place, the consolidated power of the executive branch remains, the rights we lost during the Bush administration have not yet been restored, the racist rhetoric from the willfully ignorant grows more and more virulent (especially the closer we get to possibly having a *gasp* Black Man in the Oval Office), the dollar continues to collapse, weak Democratic leaders are still running the show (Reid and Pelosi), droves of war criminals, thieves, zealots, con artists, perverts and psychopaths are all going to remain at large, and etc.

But here under this fading southern sun we still manage to dig deep down into the stinking muck of the last eight years under neocon/corpofascist rule and unearth one more fragment of hope for the human animal. As the grey days of winter approach, we still manage to believe that enough of us, after repeatedly smashing our fingers with a hammer and wondering why our fingers hurt so fucking much and then doing it again and again and again, will eventually stop smashing our own fingers; that at some point we must realize it is WE who are doing the smashing and WE have the power to stop it. Sure, there will always be the freak who gets off on the pain; we can never persuade such malformations of humanity that some things are TRUE and not open to debate. We can never change the minds of idiots who grin with glee as they work with endless determination to tear down the very construct of their own sad and pathetic lives, simpletons who are terrified that some OTHER is going to somehow come and steal their trailer, their Walmart card, their fifteen year old pickup truck or the seven bucks in their tattered leather wallet. And we shouldn't waste our energy trying. Ken Kesey said, "Put your good where it will do the most." That's the only way to look at things you cannot change. You can't save all the stray dogs in the world no matter how much you might wish to do so. Let em have their hammer and stay the fuck out of their way (until they wander over into your yard swinging that stupid thing; then they'll have to be dealt with in The Proper Fashion).

All we can really do is stare into that dark empty space before us and imagine a blank canvas where we can project that last spark, that last small shard of diamond dust glinting, that last drive and determination to manufacture hope out of the smoking remains of the American Dream. All we can do is be glad that we still possess the capacity for laughter, the capacity for song.

Here we allow ourselves a moment to chuckle approaching the eve of something potentially historic, on the cusp of something we cannot predict, at the birth and unfolding of a whole new era of "unknown unknowns." We allow ourselves five minutes of hope before we get back to making sure whatever good parts of humanity that are left still live on by making art, by growing as much of our own food as we can, by doing as little harm as we can, by helping each other and paying close attention to our world, to our government, to our surroundings, and by actively participating in the unfolding actuality of our lives, uncolored by delusion, unfounded opinion, mistaken patriotism, blissful ignorance or useless superstition. Here we continue to endure. We stand in those fading rays and smile in the small bit of warmth that covers us, and enjoy the feeling of possibility.

And we get ready for what is to come.