Can't We All Just Float Along?
All I’m asking is to space out to some psychedelic rock, eat my noms, and ignore the news again.
I’ve loved the band Spiritualized since I first heard their song, “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space” in 2001.
Frontman Jason Spaceman’s ex gently utters the song title in a gorgeous monotone before the layers of musical beauty and sadness unfurl.
That catchy quote, though, is extracted from Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World. Here it is in full:
“Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ they yell, ‘we are floating in space!’ But none of the people down there care.”
As an armchair philosopher, I care. But I also enjoy overindulging in delicious foods, nestling with my husband and cats, and ignoring the news for weeks on end. Even though I periodically participate in some activist activities when I surface from the calm of current event oblivion, I typically don’t believe anyone else must care.
We’ve all got our things to contribute and learn. Or not.
But now, here we are in the United States, with disastrously selfish leaders that many of us are so embarrassed or confused by that we stay tuned in to our comforts and small joys instead of standing up for ourselves and the rest of the underdogs we were once so privileged to pretend weren’t there.
We don’t just have a bad actor in office. We have an enabler, a permission-giver, someone who makes all the other shunned totalitarians feel seen, justified, and desperate for more.
While it would be beautiful for a collective scream to ring out through our populace to take back human dignity as our number one priority, I’d settle for the politicians who love virtue signaling to start publicly fighting for virtue in earnest.
Of the too many things to name that are killing people worldwide as a direct result of Trump, his excited skippity-hopping about with Netanyahu, giggling about ideas to turn their enemies’ lands into playgrounds as they eat the foods of the hungry and nestle into the softness of their victims’ beds… It is too much.
It has flipped me and my nonchalance around. Now, I am certain everyone must care. We have to show our discomfort, fear, and anger, and more importantly, our empathy, generosity, and love.
If Trump, Musk, and their legions of incel technocratic tyrants get excited about tearing down the last bits of the Palestinian population, which is already brutalized beyond recognition by Israel’s starvation and slaughter tactics, think what he’s excited to do here in the States.
Trump is transparent in his lust for civil war. His ego cries out to stoke the rising madness and isolationism of a public he believes his battle cry will rouse to kill each other in our shared streets. He’d gladly stay out of the way as we chew each other to bits and then sell off our parts when the last of us falls.
The war against the comfort and stability we sought to provide ourselves as a young nation began long ago, before cell phones or civil rights. It’s a war waged through silent elimination. Through discouraging deep thought that falls outside the parameters of what’s prescribed.
We’ve been intentionally divided into two sides of a bitterly ginned-up, pretend rivalry between right and left, divided further by infighting and particulars unnecessary to either side’s causes but absolutely necessary for those whose cause is to rule the whole world.
Everybody’s angry. But we keep spitting our righteous rage back into the faces of our families and neighbors. Even if someone’s anger opposes my own, I bet it’s justified on a level I don’t need to understand.
It hurts to be an alive and aware human right now. That hurt boils over into rage, and we want to rip each other up until the truth comes out in the bloodbath.
But it won’t. It’s one of the things we’ve proven since the start of recorded history: War kills people’s loved ones, and their revenge will never end until the majority agrees to end it all at once, nation-to-nation and person-to-person.
We don’t have to start mindlessly accepting each other’s truths. But a good step toward living long enough to understand how other people do things and why would be to accept that there’s plenty of room for disparate ideas, floating in all this space.