Nothing is sacred

Last week the White House shared the below video. It shows footage of explosions in Iran, spliced with clips of SpongeBob SquarePants saying, “Want me to do it again?

It was released days after 160 schoolgirls were killed by a US missile strike.

The sheer insanity and depravity of this, feels like a caricatured expression of the culmination of the insanity of the last six years, which has felt at times like a trippy dream, at others, a dystopian nightmare.

I think about the lockdowns. Mothers giving birth alone. Elders spending their final years separated from the lifeforce of family and community. In my own life, I believe my sister’s death - though eventually inevitable - was hastened by that isolation. And even if you thought the restrictions were warranted - to know that our own Prime Minister was hosting parties in Downing Street while the rest of us said goodbye to our dying through glass - reads to me like something out of the Hunger Games.

Then the Epstein files. The revelation that some of the most powerful men alive have used their power to exploit and abuse in the most unbelievable ways. The president of the most powerful nation on earth has been credibly named as a predator, a rapist, perhaps even a paedophile.

And then this: the warmongering of the nation that calls itself the moral beacon of the free world - its military adventures framed as entertainment, shared as content on a platform owned by the world’s richest man. A man who has said he wants to die on Mars.

The start of this year has been unbelievable. And there have been moments when I have felt my psyche almost fracture in the unbelievable-ness of it all, grappling with how far reality has strayed from anything I thought was possible.

And in this grappling - a slow realisation that nothing is sacred.

Not the fundamental human need for connection. Not the protection of women and children. Not the expectation that those who hold power might, at minimum, be held to the same laws as the rest of us. Not the preservation of life itself.

And yet. Through all of this I have been visited again and again by an old friend - Hope.

And today as flower shoots push through cold soil, as morning frost gives way to morning dew, as bears emerge blinking from hibernation and the world tilts again toward light - I feel her more than ever.

Because here is the thing about darkness - how far into the darkness we can stray from what most of us thought was possible creates the equal and opposite potential. The darkness sets the coordinates for the light.

So dream with me for a moment.

I imagine a world where everyone has access to clean water and abundant food, not as a luxury, not as an achievement, but simply as the baseline of being alive.

Where people don’t work “jobs” in order to survive, but contribute through their gifts and passions, where the line between work and living has dissolved.

Where art, music, dance and sport are not rewards earned from labour, not hobbies squeezed into the margins, but woven into the fabric of daily life.

Where children are at the centre of society, and schools are generative, forward-thinking places of exploration, not factories designed to produce compliant workers.

Where we have closed most of our prisons, not through force, but because we did the deeper work: healed our collective and individual trauma so it no longer replicates itself across generations, no longer detonates in violence and harm.

Where preventable disease is largely a memory, because we fundamentally reoriented toward health of body, community, land.

Unbelievable? About as unbelievable as the president of the United States releasing a video of his military bombing schoolgirls, cut to a cartoon. About as unbelievable as one man accumulating more wealth than billions of people combined and announcing his intention to detonate nuclear weapons on another planet so he can move there when this one bores him. About as unbelievable as the fact that we have built minds that are not human, and we are not entirely sure what they are.

If such unbelievable things can happen — and they have, and they are — then the unbelievably opposite is also possible. The unbelievably just. The unbelievably peaceful. The unbelievably beautiful that our hearts know, and have always known, is possible.

Nothing is sacred, yes.

Which means everything is up for grabs.