We will meet in a place where there is no darkness

Reflections on 2016

It was a bright cold day in Tulsa, and the clocks were striking thirteen. I was watching an old man outside Reasor’s use bungee cords to fasten groceries to a bicycle. As he began to ride away, his bike tipped over and all his purchases, including a watermelon, crashed to the ground in a swirl of gritty dust.  

I watched versions of this happen over and over again this past year, among my friends and also on the news. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t been struggling with something. Add to that, it’s been such a year of outliers, the unexpected, and the unprecedented that there’s no longer a historical model for the present. 

I just can’t get all these symbols and signifiers from dystopian novels out of my head lately.  Some oppressive force manipulates the collective’s thoughts and memories over time. No trust of nature or the earth. No sense of permanence.  

Winter has come and it’s all skeletal trees and dead brown grass and days that cede to darkness by late afternoon. Our cold prairie wind is at once invigorating and terrifying.  

Looking back, mistakes were made, which we’ll get into later. Personally, I consumed copious amounts of alcohol and was flippant with others’ emotions. I ate too many taquitos from QuikTrip.
I was late on my rent four out of twelve times. 

There were some bright spots, sure. We’ll get into those later. But it seemed more often there was another bomb, another shooting, another scandal, another death of an icon. These days every time I see a headline that starts with a name I assume that person is dead before I finish the sentence.  

It’s a blander Tulsa without Cornel Williams, who ran, hands-down, the ballsiest publication in town, and it’s a shame we’ve lost him, because it feels like we need Tulsa Crime Monthly now more than ever.  

Cornel was an activist. “But you can’t make people listen. They have to come ‘round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the word blew up under them,” said not Cornel, but Granger, leader of the hobo intelligentsia, about two-thirds through “Fahrenheit 451.”  

Of course “post-truth” is Oxford Dictionary’s word of this pre-apocalyptic year, which it defines as, “to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies.” Just kidding—that’s how George Orwell describes doublethink in “1984.” 

We’ve got people coming into power who are treating the earth like it’s the last party in a rent house. We’ve also got mass shootings and bombs motivated by the worst kinds of fear and hatred and extremism, and then catastrophic natural disasters that strike blindly without caring who you are or what you love. 

It’s difficult to imagine spring in an interminable winter.   

But, please remember—spring will return. And springtime in Tulsa is all bloomy dogwoods and farmers markets and warmer nights. 

“They can’t stop you from enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection,” Orwell wrote in his essay “Some Thoughts on a Common Toad.”  

“How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, the hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened, or immured in a prison or holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”   

So pass the Victory Gin. Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em, I guess—but also be prepared for when the smoke clears.

For more from M.W., read her article on her father, the Trump voter.