As Autumn arrives, the huge black walnut tree outside my house begins to drop equally huge walnuts. These tennis ball-sized missiles of doom, which I've watched growing, ominously, over our heads for the better part of the year, come plummeting down on the road, garden, and several unlucky cars with abandon. So far they haven't hit any person yet, but we always put up a sign on our fence - "DANGER!" - just in case, and strongly suggest that pedestrians walk on the other side of the street.
This happens every year, but it somehow seems especially symbolic of the world right now. As bad (fake!) news appears with lightning speed, I can't help but think of each new event as falling walnuts, traveling at some 50 mph straight down to splatter into black-sludge pieces on our porch. The Caribbean nearly drowns and infrastructure is destroyed; walnut. The dangerous, depraved excuse for a human being that runs our country in 140 characters insults his own citizens, and in a spectacular demonstration of what it means to scrape the bottom of a bottomless barrel, ridicules their struggle to survive and their strength. Two walnuts. The education secretary supports rapists; a walnut hits a bright red car, but honestly, the car was asking for it.
This doesn't even begin to cover the multitude of systemic and chilling problems here in the United States, never mind the rest of the world. But you get the point. The walnuts are loud and dangerous and plentiful, and after a while, you get so used to them falling that you barely notice the noise - but you don't spend a lengthy amount of time outside under the tree, either. It's an odd mix of complacency and understanding, which in some ways is even scarier, though I know it's not always so black and white. The thing about these walnuts, though, is that I can wash them off the porch. I can sweep them up, put them in the yard debris bin, and put the bin out on the curb. Unfortunately, you can't wash the shittiness out of the world. Nor do they make a large enough bin. (Yet.) And it's a lot harder to get up and just do something when the walnuts in question aren't just on your back deck, but seemingly, exhaustingly, all around you - and you still have to make a life for yourself.
I'd like to say I've found some magical, metaphorical-and-literal solution to this weird, outraged complacency. That I can offer up a way to balance both living and activism without letting one overwhelm the other. But I've just graduated. I have no idea what I'm doing, and I'm jobless. My grandpa is in hospice, and I listen to him laying in the piano room, waiting anxiously for the sound of his breathing and wincing when I hear the gurgle of his lungs. The last book he read before he got sick was "Young Radicals": I'd like to think that he read about someone I could eventually be. Maybe one day I'll find my own middle ground (ideas always welcome!), but realistically, it's not going to happen anytime soon.
Until then, though, I'll put up "DANGER!" signs and keep washing walnuts off the deck.
Radically.