As I’ve been writing this week – keeping tabs on the doom while trying not to get sucked into it – I’ve repeatedly found myself ruminating on the idea of kairos. It’s a relatively simple concept explored frequently in the study of rhetoric – in understanding not only our audience and purpose but also the moment in which we make any argument or take any action.
I assert quite frankly and I doubt many folks will disagree with me- we are in a fucking moment right now. Some goddamn conditions are HAPPENING.
So what is this moment? What do we do with it?
Many distinct flavors of activists and arguers have been to some extent or another been screaming into the void about the intersectionality of our various movements and moments for…ever. But we have never actually arrived at the intersection of intersectionality itself. We as a people have never really gotten to control the narrative around where the intersection is and what the right conditions are to create change.
But now our reality is here – at the intersection – regardless of where the narrative is. (And my god Facebook has it all over the place right now)
I think in all the horrors of this moment, our kairos is the weird, twisted little silver lining we all latch onto. Our collective understanding that the conditions are finally right to change our commodified, consumerist, colonized, craptastic, capitalistic, chaotic doom world is…here? Maybe? And more importantly there is an opportunity to become collectively aware that the foundations for our new world already exist – so there is hope in trying as individuals to grow something from all this.
The idea of individual change-making has for some time now perceived as too little, too late. But the the diverse, messy, hyperlocal little groups of individuals already “doing the things” if you will – they’re there. Building the systems and spaces for our new world. And no matter where YOU are, you can amplify and expand those spaces, bridging between the folks stuck in the old spaces and those already completing their shift to this new weird wonky paradigm.
It may be tempting to try and wait things out right now. To see how it shakes out. But I think that philosophy is one of the old world – and it keeps us missing out on our moments and glossing over the brilliant minds our culture leaves on the margins.
LA is on fire. Trump is attempting to dismantle the federal government of the United States. (that’s not going to go as well as he thinks it is but I digress) Putin’s out there Putin-ing. It’s snowing in Louisiana and somewhere between 5 and 50 in Nebraska and polar vortexing in DC. Genocide is still happening in Gaza. We’ve made Nazis great again in several countries. Very few people can look around our world and say anymore that commodities – that things – are worth all this, or that we can ever get back to even our “new normal” we sort of half-assed in the aftermath of COVID.
We can and should grieve the loss of what we have always known. There are many dark days ahead of us in the direct consequences of the decisions and arguments we have made – and not made – up to this point. But I am choosing to find hope and grounding myself in action and in words that can describe our collective experiences. We can still find purpose and meaning within the chaos, and we can continue moving forward even knowing we will continue to experience loss and soul-shattering grief at what – and who – we can’t save.
In a time that is everything is deeply wrong in basically all the ways, I am choosing to make space for the belief in our kairos. In our moment at which so many people have finally arrived at their own intersection of privilige and pain and realize they must do something to not only act within their spaces – but between them as well – to piece together all these individual change makers into one comprehensive new system.
This could be our moment we as individuals finally get this systemic change thing right.