Breathing Fire

Hear our pain, heal what remains

We exist in bits and pieces, bytes and binaries, codes to be deconstructed, messages to be deciphered. The ancients left us so many clues in the ashes. The last fallout was quick. An unceremonious explosion of fire and hale shadowed the earth with all our memories, all our works, all the ways we tried to preserve what we had built, but so much was built on false pretenses. Rickety frameworks were constructed and reconstructed by those who took front and center stage proclaiming they unequivocally knew what would unite humanity and enable a better, more just, and more fair world and way of being. But that was just a facade to uphold another system of control as it was still only one way.

Everyone was expected to follow this one way, adhere to it, worship it as some sort of holy bible where all the colors of the rainbow converge and we are all established and ranked according to what our ultimate oppressed, underserved, and underprivileged score is on the wheel.

Intersectionality sounds like such a lovely way to justify what "rights" and "privileges" we have or do not have access to based on how we appear, how we show up, and where and how we are borne into existence in this world... until you realize it's just another way to classify us, divide us, and put us "where we belong" on a fixed, rigid, sharply defined wheel. This chartered course we have laid out is a pathway we have attempted already, and it leads us all to more fighting as we put up walls between each other and don't allow the voices that we don't like or agree with to speak.

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We silence the voices we don’t like and call them the oppressors, but many of them are just as tiny, unheard, unnoticed, and underrepresented. They have been cast as unworthy of consideration, as insignificant voices compared to the many of us who feel that stepping into our own power means we must step upon those whom we claim have special rights and privileges beyond what has been bestowed to us.

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We draw upon the past and use the pain and trauma we carry as excuses as to why it is okay for us to speak over those we believe have historically mistreated others. We have called them out as being the problem, without allowing them to be able to have a voice and say what is meaningful to them and why. We claim to stand for diversity, equity and inclusion, yet we exclude all those who do not agree with the "correct" perspective regarding the "diverse and equitable" view we have of the world. This vision of a perfect kaleidoscopic network system we are building without looking beyond our generation, without heeding the voices of our elders.

We dismiss the signs and messages left to us by the culmination of generations of our cultures' ancestral wisdom from the past. We are obsessed and enamored with this "digital magic", we feel righteous in our selfless decision to bring the wonder and convenience of technological devices, of artificial intelligence to others across all our lands... this non-human entity that will connect everyone and everything, encasing our land, our home, with multiple vibrating lines of digital spider silk. Constructing a web of data points and reducing our lives to numerical equations for the advancement of mankind as we force our brothers and sisters to abandon their humanity and live as slaves to this glorious new system designed to save us all. We are building the spider's nest.