I'm A Fantasy Writer

I think there are a lot of us who want to change.  We know things aren’t right.  We can feel it in our guts and bones that things are out of balance.  But we don’t know how to change and we are scared.  Even though our current patterns and ways of being aren’t healthy, we’re used to them, they’re comfortable.  And we’re terrified of the unknown...But underneath it all is a longing for something different, something better. 

Well, the universe is providing.  In the last eight months we’ve had fires and plagues and riots. It’s scary but there is no longer a choice.  It will sound perverse, but part of me is relieved that there’s no longer a choice to remain the same, as comfortable as it seemed for some of us, for me.  

I’ve known for decades that things had to change, maybe my whole life.  But I felt too small and timid to take that stand.  I remember doing a report on global warming in 8th grade (30 years ago) and thinking that this was the most important thing ever...and then nothing happened.  We kept driving bigger and bigger cars and trashing the environment.  And I went along with it because that’s what everyone else was doing and it seemed so hard to try to do something different.  

But the pandemic has shown us that it is possible to act collectively.  Not easy, but possible.  There have been obvious and devastating economic consequences to shutting down, but we also got to see the positive effects of flattening the curve and seeing the environment change before our eyes. We absolutely have the capacity to make these changes. We just have to collectively decide that’s what we’re going to do, and work together to solve the problems that will arise, and mitigate the growing pains we will all experience.  

Now is the time.  We’ve had years of warnings that this moment was coming.  We kept putting it off.  Maybe in some ways that wasn’t all bad.  Maybe it gave us time to develop technology and science that can help us.  Maybe we developed it for the wrong reasons, but it can be adapted.  We have the tools, we have the resources.  This is the last call.  Now or never.    

It’s idealistic, I know.  Possibly fantastical.  Getting people to agree on things is impossible, even (and maybe especially) when their lives (or egos) are at stake...But maybe enough of a majority can agree that we’re willing to try, that we’re willing to change.  I hate to contradict the greatest Jedi master of all time, but sometimes trying and doing are the same thing.  There’s no way to predict the outcome, and it won’t be easy, but I believe that a willingness to confront our fears, work together, and commit to change will get us where we need to be.  If not in reality then at least in a really good fantasy novel that we all read to escape from the fact that the world is burning down around our ears.