Your last happiest days

FERNANDEZ

In the ’70s, we told each other in posters: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” Today, the same thought is better said this way: “These are your last happiest days.”

Either way, the message is just as true. However many days we have left, one or forever, these are our last happiest days. They are days of hope.

Though we all know how hope is a double-edged sword. Hope keeps us alive through hard times. Otherwise, it keeps us happy even when there is nothing much we can do for our troubles. Either way is just as good. For we do not really control all that are about us. We keep only a modicum of control. Without warning, things change and there is nothing much we can do about it, except to hope. Kurt Vonnegut had something to say of it: “Hope is a horse beggars ride.”

These are times to make us all become beggars.

And it’s a sad thing because, once not long ago, a president actually said we, the people, were his bosses. Now we have only one big boss to boss us around. And it is as if we have all been forcibly adopted into a dysfunctional and motherless family. A despotic father now calls every shot. And he calls it with no concept at all of fairness and justice. He is a bully. He bullies especially the weakest and poor. He reserves his most malicious bullying for those who cross him or disagree with him. He extols and spoils those who give him the blindest loyalty, those who would do anything, even to kill, for him. He divides his family. It is the one thing he is good at.

Unfortunately for him, when he divides his family and people this way: the divided parts always come closer to each other. It is the inevitable nature of dividends to define what, who and where they are. When you divide people into those in power and those upon whom power is inflicted, the former, those spoiled with power, compete with each other while the latter can only bind themselves closer. Whether poor or not so poor, they are brought together by the fact of their powerlessness. They bind together by their shared view of their present and their one collective future. Nothing binds people closer together and stronger than this cord. The autocratic father who divides his people this way takes an inexorable risk. History proves it time and time again.

Soon, the oppressed begin to speak a language that they, the powerful, are deaf to. The powerless tell each other their own narratives. And they immediately see the truthfulness of it. For it is the story of the common doom of their lives, their narrative spoken in the peculiar language of the oppressed. The powerful live too by their own narratives. But they are absolutely disconnected from the narratives of everyone else. They live inside the rapture of their own Marcosian realities, their Oz, their Neverland. The dysfunctional father thinks all is well even while his children go about the darkened streets calling for the lost and exiled mother of their salvation. They search and will find their heroes. And they will find they are everywhere, languishing in jail, or dead on some darkened street corner. And we’ve seen it happen before. History shows time and time again:

Nothing is more dangerous for despots than heroes jailed or dead. And the powerless have many heroes in reserve.

They are signs to portend another Humpty Dumpty’s big historical fall. In these last happiest days of our lives, we have something more than hope. All we need to do is to keep speaking to each other. And as we do that, to wait.