Am I A Revolutionary?

Am I A Revolutionary?

The Apathy and Despair of a Vigilant Woman

    These are my thoughts after a walk this morning:

    I am no stranger to what ails the world. I’ve done some reading and some tweeting. I’ve watched and winced at live videos of people being actively destroyed by genocidal powers. I recognize the violence of imperialism to people near and far between; the blinding power of bills, notes, and gold to a very basic sense of others. I’ve commented, critiqued, and imagined for something unknown. And I was controversial, and different, and labeled everything under the sun. But am I a revolutionary?

    As I am just starting my senior spring of university, these are the questions that I’m inundated with. Not from any particular person or movement, but from a voice within myself. In evaluating my own ethos and knowns, there is often a guilt-tripping dissonance emanating from what I believe and what I do. And I try to appease it by reading, listening, asking questions, voting, protesting, and getting coffee elsewhere. Being in the industrial university system, stifled by comfortable neoliberal sanitized calls for "diversity, equity, and inclusion"; stifled by fear of blacklisting, ostracization, and blatant violence. I am pushed into invisibility—encouraged to be unseen—and expected to be grateful for the disregard of me. My passion is snuffed and relegated to tea candles.

    I think that metaphor is useful, because there is nothing chaotic of tea candles. The rules that I’ve been made to live and die by repress me to sterile complacency. I may dance and flicker, but I don’t move beyond the wick. It is natural and well within me to consume, to grow, to transform gilded monuments to soft Black soot, but conformed to the thing that is considered most stable—a small tin can of industrial wax.

    I digress, but this is what is important to me. What is care with no action to care? What is ethos with no outlet? Why is it that I can say the things and not do them? Barring obstacles or a lack of resources, there are still ways to be effective. There are people and places to know and go. Why let fear of destruction and death keep me from doing all I can to give the greatest gift: love?

    So I ask myself again: am I a revolutionary? Do I hold to the standards of nuance and accept the yoke of love? I don’t know yet, but as I work to what I want to be and see for tomorrow, I will continue to try now.