Sewer Rats
the harbingers of what we all need right now
It is an understatement to say that we live in wild times right now. Especially for women. The president-elect of the United States is a known sexual predator, women are dying because of the lack of care, or the fear of providing care for miscarriages (the maternal mortality rate in Texas has gone up by 56%), and in Winnipeg, a search of a landfill is about to be underway to recover the bodies of two Indigenous women murdered by a serial killer. I know there is more, but I think you get the picture.
I so want to believe that as a species we are evolving, but nothing about our current state of affairs is very convincing. Like, ZERO things.
At my bookclub meet up this week, one of my friends pointed out that after a global pandemic there is a subsequent rise in fascism and authoritarian governments. It happened after the Spanish Flu and it seems to be happening again after Covid19. I can't help but wonder why this is and why, as a society, we continue to fall into the same patterns over and over and over.
Remember at the beginning of the pandemic (or a few months into it), when some of us were adjusting to working/schooling from home and we started doing things like getting outside more, taking up hobbies and adopting all the animals? Remember how we kept saying how we didn't want to go back to the same way we were living after this was all over? How much we wanted to keep some of the new ways we’d discovered while staying home and keeping ourselves and others safe? We were all so gung-ho about the ‘new normal’ we were going to implement after this was all over.
HA!
As I look around at all the plants I accumulated during the pandemic—probably more than 60—I think about how I used to spend hours watering them, talking to them, and yes, even naming them back in 2021. Now, some weeks I forget to water them altogether, and I don't give my plant babies even half the level of love and attention I used to (and I think they know it!). We’re all back to the hustle of life/work/school/play/cook/clean/shop/scroll/
repeat and it’s NOT a new normal. It’s the same ol’ same ol’ normal!
I sometimes wonder where all that energy we had for a 'new normal' went. I mean, I know it obviously went back to the HuStLE, but I wish we had kept more of it on tap somewhere. I wonder if fear and uncertainty about the world and how fragile it all really is forced us to where we are now. It’s like we all (to be clear, I am using the Royal WE here—WE as in humanity) had a collective reconning with our mortality and got so scared that we can't face what this new normal might actually look like, or muster the effort it would take to get there.
Children often regress as an unconscious way to cope with difficult situations or feelings of helplessness, and it feels like, as a society, we’re doing the same thing. We’ve regressed like a toddler with a newborn sibling and just want to go back to a time when it was all about US. I hate to admit it, but there is probably a bit of MAGA-ness in all of us. A nostalgia for a time when we thought life was great—everyone we knew was doing relatively well, and we were blissfully ignorant of the plight of others. A time before the great a-WOKE-ning (a time before social media maybe?).
It’s not hard to understand the appeal of this kind of blissful ignorance. The sleepy town of Status Quo sounds like a nice place. A place where you don’t have to worry about anyone else, or think about the consequences of your actions or the lives of people who are not you. The problem is, no matter how much folks want to go back to a place or time they thought was great (or convince you that this is possible), we just can’t. Whether we want to admit it or not, we are all Dorothy. We’ve seen the small man behind the curtain pretending to be the all-powerful Wizard, and we cannot unsee how broken our world has become.
I don’t know if I have a point to all this rambling. What I do know is we have to keep going, we can’t plant our roots in Status Quo. We have to get back on the highway and keep moving. Keep writing the words, sharing the information, pushing and pulling for a better way, boycotting and/or supporting the causes that speak to us, thinking about others, and more importantly, wanting the same level of love, life and happiness for them as we do for ourselves.
December is two days away and I know it will be a hectic month (and more so for women and caregivers and do-ers of all the emotional labour). My hope for everyone this season is that we can all find that bit of strength that’s probably buried under a pile of To Do and Xmas and Year-End lists and tap into it. That we remember what it feels like to believe in a better way (that imagined ‘new normal’) and to hold onto it… with a death grip if that’s what it takes!
I’ll leave you with a poem. Because what I just said in way too many words, Caitlin—being a brilliant poet—has distilled it down to this…
Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat
by Caitlin Seida
Hope is not the thing with feathers
That comes home to roost
When you need it most.
Hope is an ugly thing
With teeth and claws and
Patchy fur that’s seen some shit.
It’s what thrives in the discards
And survives in the ugliest parts of our world,
Able to find a way to go on
When nothing else can even find a way in.
It’s the gritty, nasty little carrier of such
diseases as
optimism, persistence,
Perseverance and joy,
Transmissible as it drags its tail across
your path
and
bites you in the ass.
Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird,
Emily.
It’s a lowly little sewer rat
That snorts pesticides like they were
Lines of coke and still
Shows up on time to work the next day
Looking no worse for wear.