“It’ll be okay,” people say. They come from all corners, the
left, the right, in-between.
We adapt quickly, forgetting how it felt before, a month
ago, a year ago, last decade. I remember 2006 only with benchmarks. Kuwait. Visa runs to Bahrain, to Sinai. Selling
an apartment in Jersey City.
It’ll be okay, because we adapt and continue, no matter how
not-okay things become. Even in Mosul, people continue to exist. Even in Aleppo,
people laugh as well as cry.
And tonight, I was sick of chasing fruit flies in my
apartment, so I went to a coffee shop, stopped at the supermarket, saw the
Indian woman who threads eyebrows for seven dollars, and walked along Hollywood
Boulevard, thinking about how “okay” is just getting up every day with food,
water, and power. Will we
interrupt our migrant-worker food chain, bomb people for no clear reason,
incite hatred, cut taxes on billionaires and the filthy-rich?
We might.
Will we mobilize?
We may.
Or will we adapt and not notice when redistricting gets a
little worse, similar to how we do little as the environment changes
incrementally?
Likely.
We’ll keep calling Senators, writing the mayor, and posting
links about how easy humans are to hack. We’ll march on Washington, we’ll march
on New York, we’ll march on MacArthur Park until no one ever talks about cake
in the rain ever again. Some of us will quietly check the expiration dates on
our passports, look at multiple routes to Mexico, to Canada, to Terminal
Island.
We’ll keep working, making our rent and mortgage payments,
getting haircuts, shopping for jeans that don’t make a muffin top, and trying
to eat more vegetables in case Rome doesn’t burn. But it will be, in the end,
okay, simply because we will adapt to whatever reality we get, whether it is the
same as now or as bad as our favorite apocalypse movie.
Because that’s what
humans do.
On Hollywood Boulevard, I thought about the definition of
okay as I put my feet down over the stars of Melissa Gilbert, Lowell Thomas,
Eddie Albert, and celebrities long forgotten. I stopped at Alex Trebek and
looked up at sunset over Los Angeles.
Tomorrow could bring anything. Let’s hope for a bit of luck,
and keep mobilizing, doing all these little things, being the fruit flies in
the White House dining room, until we run out of ideas.
