The Age of Our Malcontents

(NORWALK, CT) – We all believe in something. You don’t think so? I think so. I think, fundamentally, unless we have fundamentally disordered thinking, we all believe in something. There is some truth in front of you. We can both like one crepe, without liking all crepes. We can, as a collective agree on something that we may individually not even agree on, you may take a bite, and look at what the other person thinks before saying whether or not you like it. In fact, we tend to do this more when we’re kids, because we’re learning how to socialize with one another.

Let me answer a question I asked without answering before via publication. Sanity is not relative. But the state of being disorder is inherently subjective. Down to the languages we know and we learned. I know: Ancient Greek, French, English, Spanish, Contemporary Greek, Arabic, and Gaelic, alongside German (which I won a state award in). I was born knowing three languages because my parents taught me two and my environment made me learn another. This is sometimes referred to as an international school accent, but I want to think of it as something beyond the binary of rhoticism or American and English. I have my own accent, influenced by class, area, and region. 

I even have a very clear sociolect, my Mom, a Peruvian, sometimes speaks like a valley girl because she learned english at UC Berkeley over the summer, which is where she met my French dad who graduated from “Cal” with a 4.0 in math and went to Harvard Law School the semester after. My mom went to the Fashion Institute of Technology, a SUNY, to get further associates on top of her bachelor’s from ESMOD (Ecoles Superieurs De les arts Moderne) and grandes ecole for fashion.

Fundamentally, our realities, the reality of the world in front of us, is bifurcating. There is one reality, the reality of the capital holders. Technically, my reality, as The Radical Times is an incorporated c corporation split equally among all current employees and party by some fmr employees who retain the option to sell some non-voting shares in the Collective. 

I want to speak simply then. On the real. The romantic ideal that one of three of my nations of birth prides itself in being, the romantic ideal of one person that is simply average among all the tides of the world. I have read ‘romantic’ novels. And, to be frank, I read novels from what is ostensibly the progressive era of American politics and I see back only our current reality.

We are not in the roaring 20s. We are in the era of malcontentment. An age that sees itself as perpetually in opposition to what it is. The era that believes that tomorrow will come but that hope that it does come is always superseded by the reality that we are getting poorer so 800 billionaires in America can get wealthier. Even among the well-off there is an attitude that everything is worse. And that’s because it is. We have entered the death stage of capitalism, China is the leader of the world as much as it can be, and America is an unfree nation. You are not the exception. Everyone is the statistic. But we must overcome the framing, the narrative, and rise above to hope for a better future. Not for you or me, not for any one damn person. But because we must do this or see the world die wealthy and too warm for us to live in.