Resisting the Forces of the River is the Only Choice
When I was a child, I had a recurring dream.
In the dream, a world of grayscale, I'm standing on one side of a violent, thrashing river—perhaps 100 yards from the other side. The wind blows in random gusts and the water responds in plumes and sprays, daring me to try to cross. On the far side is a figure but I can't quite make him out. I try to screw my eyes harder to see his face, to read the expression, to connect. Because it is a dream, the face becomes closer, clearer, and while I am aware of the invisible rage passing between our gazes, I can see that he is trying to look into me as well.
I get the feeling the He is Me, that He may have something important to tell me, something vital. The feeling that I desperately need to connect with this person on the far side of the raging nature is overwhelming and, as if my need is so powerful that it can move the confines of the physical world, I notice that the river begins to shrink and He and I are closing in one another.
As we get closer, as if the very act of minimization infuriates the river, the wind and water become even more violent and hurricane-like, making seeing Him even more difficult. This continues until I can almost see Him clearly, confirm that He is Me and receive that urgent message...
...and then it ends.
I don't know how many times I had this dream but I believe it was nightly for years. From the time I was three or four until around my eighth year. A habit of mine was to rock myself to sleep on all fours. Not so unusual except that I would rock so hard that I would bang my head into the wall over and over, eventually creating a permanent indentation in the drywall and cracking two of my wooden crib headboards. I think this was my three and four year old way of trying to knock this dream out of my head.
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In times of turmoil, the advise most given by the Zen/AA crowd is to ‘be as a leaf on the river.’ Go with the flow and that sort of thing. The idea being that by allowing the current to take you along its path, one expends less unnecessary energy fighting against the currents of current events. Relax, chill out, and float.
Depending on the specific river, this isn’t bad advise. A slowly moving ride is sometimes exactly what is necessary and, as in the Zen story about the guy who just wants to cross to the other side, not a bad choice. The raging whitewater monstrosity of my dream is not a great river to be a leaf on. That sort of tumult rarely takes you anywhere but over a waterfall or into some jutting rocks. A violent current requires resistance.
There seems to be a misjudgment these days at what resistance looks like. Today’s resistors want to tame the river, to stop the water, to reverse its direction. Resistance isn’t about control. Resistance is not moving with the water like one of those jutting rocks. The rock stands its ground. It lets the water crash into it and be forced around rather than be moved by the force. It’s the difference between civil disobedience and civil unrest.
There's an awful lot of pissing and moaning by the GenZ about the Boomers and just as much from the Boomers about the Zoomers. The simple answer to the huge differences in approaches is that the eldest in our collective have had a lifetime to become who they are and believe in what they choose. They are not entirely set but mostly so. They are the rock in the water, defiantly resisting the rush of news, cultural wars, and unrelenting bullshit that passes for what we're supposed to give a fuck about. Like the stone, the water does chip away and erode the outer layers but the core is solid. Zoomers are not formed yet. The water carries them from place to place, tossing them around like the aforementioned leaves. They haven't lived enough life to figure out who they are yet.
Of course these two generations don't see eye to eye on almost anything.
To my mind true resistance does not require rage because you can't fight rage with more of it. I mean, you can but it rarely ends up well for anyone. Resistance is about the possibility of change. If everyone is dead or disabled by the melee is the change you seek, I suppose the righteous rage makes sense but also, you're a dick and a thoughtless one at that.
True resistance is standing firm and immovable in the face of the injustices of the world (which, face it, mostly comes from other literate apes rather than the devil or spirits or bad luck). For all the screaming, angry protests of the summer of 2020, the one that stood out for me was two years earlier when Patricia Okoumou climbed the Statue of Liberty to protest the detention of migrant children. She remained on the base for more than three hours, and Liberty Island was evacuated. It was solid, focused, and made international news.
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These days I don't dream much (or at least I don't remember them with any clarity). Once in a while, I'll wake up and recall the elements of a dream that involves one of the husband's of an ex-wife and a Zeppelin but rarely.
As for my acts of resistance, they tend toward smaller and less noticeable refusals to play along as well as my own natural contrarian attitude. I was skeptical in the eighties of the Satanic panic, I never bought into the repressed memory craze and, in both cases, I was on point. Likewise, I won't stoop to categorizing all differences down to race or adopt the hysteria of a genocide against transgender people by refusing the dogma of erasing the notion of biological sex.
The raging river is supposed to rage but we need to be focused on what's on the other side.
