the quiet part

hypothetically speaking in real time

Remember that time when those astroNOTs (Katy Perry & Co) went to space for a few minutes and then everybody spent a few days arguing about whether or not it was a feminist ride and whether or not calling it a “ride” was anti-feminist? In all the hubbub there was a soundbite from Gayle King that did not get anywhere near the attention that I think it deserved:

“What Blue Origin wants to do is take the waste here and figure out a way to put it in space to make our planet cleaner.”

Whut?

Since moving back to California, I have been working part-time and taking classes at the local community college. One of the classes I took last semester was astronomy and so much about that class broke my brain in some wonderful ways. What we know about space is basically nothing compared to all we don’t know. Even with all current technology, we can only physically reach a fraction of what we can see, with no reason to believe that all we can’t see doesn’t extend into infinity. If space and time have an endpoint, we have no way of knowing when or where it is.

And the fact that an inhumane white man can be so internally vacant that he can look into what is infinite and unknowable and see a place to put Earth waste? That’s wild. Wildly irresponsible. Wildly entitled. Just wild.

Because what do you have to believe about Earth and its place/importance in our solar system, about humanity and our place/importance in Earth’s ecosystem, about an American billionaire and his place/importance in making decisions about our ecosystem in our solar system to just shrug off the idea of using space as our dumpster?

But we didn’t talk about that. We talked about the rich women who took a quick ride in the space dick of a rich man until some other distraction popped up. Because that’s what we do as people being distracted to death.

Since leaving social media, I’ve become super aware of how much time and energy we spend talking about things we’re not actually connected to. Outrages in other states. Headlines from other countries. High emotional stakes in things we have no real practical way to affect.

Meanwhile, we’re only vaguely aware of what’s happening in our own neighborhoods, spaces, and selves… and don’t really know what to think, feel, or do—unless the collective tells us.

We’ve lost the habit of thinking for ourselves. And we’ve filled that void with hot takes, moral panics, purity tests, and public performances.

I love thinking. I genuinely enjoy spending time in my head. Playing with concepts and ideas. Asking questions. Making up answers. Making up stories. Making up everything.

Because everything is made up.

We have been living in the stunted imaginations and bad ideas of old-timey white men and we are currently caught in an avalanche of their collapsing frameworks as current day capitalism, whiteness, and evangelicalism (same/same/same) refuse to loosen their death grip on control.

We have reached the limits of the white evangelical male imagination and because they literally cannot imagine a world where they are not on top, they are determined to drag us all backwards. And too many of us have gotten caught in a weird middle ground where we think being better than them means pretending they are not as bad, not as corrupt, and not as dangerous as they are.

Watching the MAGA meltdown over the Epstein files has been… interesting.

If we’re not careful (and it may already be too late), they’ll flip it.
They know Trump is on the list. They’re just pretending not to.
They’ll push to “find out,” then abandon him and keep the moral high ground:

“We handled it immediately. You all stood by for years, voting for Democrats who let this happen.”

And they won’t be wrong.