No one that I know has died yet. I repeat this to myself when I start feeling the way I felt after my father died. It’s hard to be awake. It’s hard to look at reality directly and not give into the pressure to pretend that everything is fine when nothing is.
We live upside down. “Woke” is pejorative because a convict has been re-elected President of the United States. Everyone is sick all the time but few wear masks or mitigate against airborne viruses because doing so would disrupt the simulacrum of “normality.”
Illness is a sign that you don't live in fear even though there are so many reasons to be afraid. If you get sick, you risk losing everything. Once you’re homeless, you’ll be offered medical assistance in dying and thrown away.
You keep driving and flying despite the illness and despite the fires and floods. The fires in Canada are already burning out of control and it’s June 1. Already the sky out west is full of soot and airborne particles. There is no indication from any level of government that people should protect themselves by wearing respirator masks. The government says that it wants to keep people safe while avoiding all talk about climate change.
Sometimes, I wish I could suspend disbelief. People who are against vaccines believe that all illness can be blamed on vaccines. How simple life would be if I could believe that everything bad that happens to me is due to vaccines rather than to bad luck or lack of money or poor government policy. It would be so much simpler if all I had to do was avoid a needle that the government won’t make available to me anymore.
I haven’t looked into the conspiracy theories regarding the fires, but I expect that they’ll involve blaming the Liberal government, which deserves a lot of blame but not for the reasons indicated in the theories, and not blaming the oil companies or the imperial way of living.
I am so tired. I’ve been experiencing hot flashes and strong emotions. I have become a raisin. Everything is parched; I await only a spark.
After my father died, I really wanted to believe in God. I thought that if I could suspend my disbelief, even for a moment, I would find comfort. But, despite my desperation, I could never do it. I would lie in bed and dream about how suspension would grant relief and instead cling obstinately to disbelief.
Canada is burning and will burn all summer. The heat dome has arrived, so we live in the dark, hoping that the power won’t go out. This is a privilege because we’re not at work and we're not being bombed.
People will die in this heat, but the Prime Minister can only dream of new pipelines. The Americans have started another war. It feels like an unending loop: more heat, more violence, more death. The people in power are doing everything they can to bring us closer to the end.
Small consolations: learning to play guitar poorly, trying new recipes, reading, biking, repairing. Some days, it feels like enough. Other days are too full of foreboding.
I don't think any westerner with an ounce of self-awareness can deny that we are the bad guys. That’s arguably always been the case, but attacking Iran without pretense and pretending that Iran is a destabilizing force afterwards is so nakedly evil, so wrong, so terrible, so reckless that I don’t see how we come back from this. But of course, I thought the same thing about the ongoing genocide, so clearly my mind is just unable to come up with sufficiently dystopian outcomes.
Screenshot of G7 statement:
Marit Stiles’s post congratulating Zohran Mamdani is bitterly funny and terribly depressing. For the record, Stiles kicked Sarah Jama out of the Ontario NDP for being right about Gaza too early and refusing to keep quiet about it. Stiles still refuses to apologize to Jama, who lost her seat in the last election after Stiles refused to let her back into the party.
Happily, the people on the internet have kept receipts and Stiles was dragged by both leftwing and rightwing accounts for her obvious hypocrisy and doublespeak.
Stiles’s post also highlights how a person like Mamdani would never be given the chance to run under a mainline political banner in Canada. Such a person, who surely exists, would be filtered out. If such a person did make it through initial vetting, they would be made to shut up or go away. Stiles would know.
Mamdani has refused to distance himself from the slogan “globalize the intifada.” He has steadfastly advocated for Palestine. He is a vocal critic of both Modi and Netanyahu. His platform includes a rent freeze, city-owned grocery stores and free buses. He refuses to conflate opposition to Zionism with antisemitism. In short, Mamdani is a brown man with inconvenient opinions and he won.
Stiles’s congratulation shows how hollow many white so-called social democrats are. Stiles believes in nothing and has no principles or red lines or new ideas. Now she wants to jump on the Mamdani bandwagon even though she would never let a Canadian version of Mamdani see the light of day or open their mouth.