I was being a bit of a doomer talking with my mom the other day, if all those people out the streets protesting the ICE gestapo raids and wannabe Robocop armed military militias, if despite all this is it too late. She said that's what they want you to think, to give up. It's never too late she said. You can't think like that. It's hard, though I don't want to deflate people. (I don't want people to take my advice here.) I remember the Floyd protests very clearly though even if it seems most have tried to forget, that 'a better world is possible' as if it was never said before. I just wonder if people out there in the streets ever get a foreboding sense that maybe it will always be dark. Yet they still have to battle in a darkness maybe they cannot win, but if they gave in they would lose their souls standing and staying back. That would be a worse death for them. I read from an author I like where she was reflecting on mourning for a future more than a past, as she had pegged an authoritarian shift happening years before what is accumulating now. While I was reading and relating hard, and I loved the prose yet something else gnawed. I thought I don't want to be self pitying in a long term way like that. Maybe even considering what is going on with the Palestinians. While I was 'yes I do mourn the world that could have been, that we thought was promised,' this is not new or novel. What about a larger picture, what about those who were trapped in WWI or WW2 and they had their lives shattered and lost. Further back people whose villages were burned by invaders and conquerors, or plagues that wiped them away. Where these centuries past people didn't even live in a world where they could see and contemplate knowing the dreams lost in the way they are nowadays. More possibilities existed and taken. All over history people lost their futures. Very few fought in comparison to those who said 'no this is enough, I had enough.' They are the reason some of us try. Maybe they are the part of the reason we have survived.