Another friend asked if I am despondent as the days wear on. No, I'm not, I said. They said it comes in waves each day. I get it, I said.

The only reason I haven't been desperate or despondent is because I keep reminding myself that it's not all my weight to carry, nor is it yours.

But it's scary. It's easy to get swept away. The foundations of the liberal order of the world are shook, and in the case of the US and increasingly elsewhere as well, these foundations are already fractured and crumbling.

As the Marxist Antonio Gramsci said, "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”

He wrote those words in his Prison Notebooks after the fascists threw him in prison for his thoughts. "For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning," were the words of the prosecutor. His prison conditions led to his death a little over a decade later. Fascists have no compassion for prisoners, and certainly not political enemies.

Fascists seemingly have no compassion at all. No empathy.

How else do we define monsters?

As much as it might seem that the new structures are being built and inevitable, things are not what they seem.

I don't care about the demolishing of an old building representative of the focal point of violent authority for generations, and I'm generally disheartened that so many people care about a building more than the countless atrocities happening each day.

For now, a building is seemingly what gets people to care. A building that most of them have never seen with their own eyes. For a ballroom they will never dance in.

It's not just a distraction, it's a farce.

It's not as symbolic or representative as it may seem, unless you wish to rebuild the same world that has already come and gone. Why would you want that world? That world is the world that gave birth to this one. That world was built on violence and pain, the same as this one.

Is this the world you wish to build?

Again?

Today, people will give kindness and joy to children and celebrate community.

People will think of the dead, but not the dying.

Today candy will be given freely.

You'll spend the evening surrounded by cute little monsters roaming your neighborhoods.

Tomorrow, over 42 million people in this country will not have enough money for food.

Who would do this?

Monsters.

People are already starving. Here. The places you already name in your mind.

The old world is dying, the new one has yet to be born.

They haven't laid their foundation yet.

They never will.

These monsters don't seek to build, they seek to destroy, to consume.

These monsters don't have the capacity to build.

It would be a hopeful thought, knowing that they can never build something that lasts.

If only they weren't chasing from nightmares to the waking world, seeking to drink blood and inflict enduring pain.

Monsters?

But no. As Hannah Arendt whispers in my mind when I feel this way, these aren't monsters. She reminds me of the banality of evil.

These are human people. Making choices. Going to the office each day in order to do the work to set the world on fire. They are people making choices.

This isn't a spooky tale.

It might be easier if they actually were monsters, as the world would see them as such. But they're not.

But that means the rules of campfire stories and horror movies don't apply.

It means that there are no rules.

It means they don't live in your nightmares and they have no supernatural power.

That's a scary thought.
It's also empowering.

The old world is dying, the new world is not yet born.
There are no rules.

This means we have power.
We can face the monsters.

If we so choose.

no ends, only means